A Frenchman once pointed out to Louis de Bernières that Britain was the most exotic country in Europe, adding that it was 'an immense lunatic asylum'. Casting his mind back to the village in southern Surrey where he grew up in the sixties & seventies, but plagued by a novelist's inability to stick to the truth, Louis de Bernières brings us in Notwithstanding stories of a vanished England which will delight readers of his much-loved novels.

The English village was a place where a lady might dress as a man in plus fours & spend her time shooting squirrels with a twelve bore, or keep a vast menagerie in her house. A retired general might give up wearing clothes, a spiritualist might live in a cottage with her sister & the ghost of her husb&, & people might think it quite natural to confide in a spider that lives in a potting shed.

De Bernières



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A Frenchman once pointed out to Louis de Bernières that Britain was the most exotic country in Europe, adding that it was 'an immense lunatic asylum'. Casting his mind back to the village in southern Surrey where he grew up in the sixties & seventies, but plagued by a novelist's inability to stick to the truth, Louis de Bernières brings us in Notwithstanding stories of a vanished England which will delight readers of his much-loved novels.

The English village was a place where a lady might dress as a man in plus fours & spend her time shooting squirrels with a twelve bore, or keep a vast menagerie in her house. A retired general might give up wearing clothes, a spiritualist might live in a cottage with her sister & the ghost of her husb&, & people might think it quite natural to confide in a spider that lives in a potting shed.

De Bernières



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Sephy is a Cross
- a member of the dark-skinned ruling class. Callum is a Nought
- a 'colourless' member of the underclass who

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Bjørn Hansen, a respectable town treasurer, has just turned fifty & is horrified by the thought that chance has ruled his life. Eighteen years ago he left his wife & their two-year-old son for his mistress, who persuaded him to start afresh in a small, provincial town & to dabble in amateur dramatics. In time that relationship also faded, & after four years of living alone Bjørn contemplates an extraordinary course of action that will change his life for ever.

He finds a fellow conspirator in Dr Schiøtz, who has a secret of his own & offers to help Bjørn carry his preposterous & dangerous plan through to its logical conclusion. However, the sudden reappearance of his son both fills Bjørn with new hope & complicates matters. The desire to gamble with his comfortable existence proves irresistible, however, taking him to Vilnius in Lithuania, where very soon he cannot tell whether he's tangled up in a game or reality.

Novel 11, Book 18, for which Dag Solstad received the Norwegian Critics



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Fuller's poetry can be seen to build a bridge of boats between light verse & solemn elegy with the best technique of anyone writing in Britain now, ' Peter Porter. Throughout his long & prolific career, John Fuller has been admired for the way in which he melds levity with serious reflection. In this beautiful new collection of twenty-one poems he proves himself, once again, a true master of this art. They take us from birth to death: from a baby's first delightful babblings, to the dignified, measured words of a man surveying his life & marriage, & looking forward into the unknown. There are moments of great joie de vivre, of pleasure in the earthy things of life; & yet, beyond, there is always a sense of a vaster, more elusive universe. The snorting of the horses in a field in ' Dreams', the egret on the rock in ' Sentinel': these are nature's mysteries. To make sense of these, we have language & music. Celebratory, playful, reconciled to the questions that will not be answered, these poems exude a miraculous kind of peace & understanding: 'A point of closure that allows the next/ Inevitable sentence to begin. ...

In Now I Know the body of a young man, crucified on a metal cross, is found dangling from a crane in a scrapyard & subsequently ...

The body of a young man, crucified on a metal cross, is found dangling from a crane in a scrapyard & subsequently vanishes. Tom, an ambitious young police officer, think he's had a lucky break when he's put in charge of this bizzare murder investigation. Nik is doing research for a film about a contemporary life of Jesus. Their independent investigations ultimately bring them together in an unexpected climax. ...

Now Is the Hour is the first major novel by Tom Spanbauer since The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon in ...