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Vanishing
There is no such thing as an ordinary life. But Kenneth Brill's is more extraordinary than most. By the time he is arrested for espionage towards the end of the Second World War he has an incredible story to tell. Under interrogation he describes his unusual childhood, shares the decadent details of his training as a painter at the prestigious Slade School of Art in the 1930s and explains just why he was so very friendly with the prostitutes of London's Soho underworld; he narrates his heroic actions as a camouflage officer before El Alamein, when he helped pull off one of the greatest acts of deception in the history of warfare, and accounts for his part in a night-time break-in of the royal residence of Buckingham Palace. This is a life lived to the full, whether as son, friend, lover, teacher or pupil. The only question is: whose side is he really on? 'A huge, complex novel, at turns both blackly funny and bleakly moving, driven by truly original characters' Daily Mail 'Clever, subtle, and rewarding' Times Literary Supplement
Nourishment
‘Woodward’s study of the ways in which we consume ourselves and those we love is surprising – and surprisingly charming – darkly witty and altogether brilliant’ Easy Living The English are an unusual bunch: quirky and eccentric, often reserved and reticent, but always strong and resilient. Tory Pace, the heroine of this beautifully written and hilarious black comedy, is all of these things. Typically, she’s trying to make the best of life in a difficult time: struggling, as only a mother can, to sustain her family in a land starved of nourishment. But like so many triumphs over adversity, her survival comes with a heavy price. Beginning shortly after the outbreak of war and continuing into the deftly drawn austerity years that followed, Woodward offers a generous family saga. Equally memorable for poignant moments of sadness, comic tableau, witty observations and unforgettable characters, Nourishment is a novel like no other – every bit as unique and charming as an English family, in fact.
Legoland
A stunning new collection of stories from the Man Booker Prize and Whitbread Prize-shortlisted author.Many of Legoland's fifteen stories begin with Woodward's sharp and unflinching eye alighting upon an apparently everyday detail or situation, but then a sudden twist takes them to an unsettling place where life's normal rules no longer apply.Whether he's writing about domestic subjects - such as in 'The Unloved', when a woman in a dysfunctional marriage finally leaves home after decades of misery - or tackling large issues on a global stage - the tyranny of dictators in 'The Fall of Mr and Mrs Nicholson', or the invasion of an unnamed country in 'The Flag' - each story is full of Woodward's ...
The Paper Lovers
'Hugely enjoyable, a unique love story that’s both witty and poignant.' John Boyne, author of The Heart's Invisible Furies Arnold Proctor’s quiet life is thrown off balance when he falls obsessively in love with Vera, a religious woman and one of his wife’s friends. Vera seems untroubled by her wrongdoing, yet faithless Arnold is wracked with guilt. He has never believed in God, but now he wonders if he truly believes in anything at all? Polly makes handcrafted paper, and even though the age of paper is dead, she runs a successful shop selling her exquisite products. Polly is secure and happy in her life, until the day her husband Arnold makes a very uncharacteristic declaration. Gerard Woodward's The Paper Lovers is a devastating story of sexual, religious and artistic obsession. It is about love and betrayal, and what becomes of us after our greatest certainties have been shattered.
A Curious Earth
Aldous Jones is in a abad way: his dilapidated house is empty of family but full of hoarded odds and ends that remind him of his dead wife and son. What follows is a heartbreakingly funny quest that will lead him first to the National Gallery, and then to Ostend.
The Seacunny
Gerard Woodward’s poetry has long been admired for its sharp and unflinching eye, its fearless surrealism, its blacker-than-black humour, and its ability to find a little abyss in any detail, no matter how innocuous or domestic. Here, his considerations of trampolines, bird-tables and lightbulbs will leave the reader unable to regard those things in quite the same way again; they will also find science-fiction novels compressed to a few stanzas, strange potted biographies, and lists of edicts from long-dead tyrants. However, The Seacunny finds this inimitable voice extend itself in new and unexpected directions, with the poet turning to the natural world and to human relationships in ways that are affecting as they are surprising. This is a book of astonishing range, and declares a new lyric direction in Woodward’s poetry.
I'll Go to Bed at Noon
Colette Jones has had drink problems in the past, but now it seems as though her whole family is in danger of turning to alcohol. Her oldest son has thrown away a promising musical career for a job behind the counter in a builders' merchants, and his drinking sprees with his brother-in-law Bill, a pseudo-Marxist supermarket butcher who seems to see alcohol as central to the proletarian revolution, have started to land him in trouble with the police. Meanwhile Colette's recently widowered older brother is following an equally self-destructive path, having knocked back an entire cellar of homemade wine, he's now on the gin, a bottle a day and counting. Who will be next? Her youngest son had de...
The Vulture
The vulture, the presiding genius of Gerard Woodward’s collection, is at once sympathetic and awful, intimate and other. Woodward naturally positions himself at uncomfortable borders and thresholds, and in doing so alerts us to the flimsiness of the conceits of home, of family and human culture. Many poets have challenged our lazy habit of addressing nature though the pathetic fallacy; few have had the nerve to consciously embrace it as a subversive strategy, through which we can explore the strange intimacies we share with other life-forms. The Vulture shows insects and animals and plants invade, infect and fuse with us at every turn; elsewhere, the architecture of our lives, our houses, gardens, careers and bodies, are revealed as the provisional drafts they are. No contemporary poet unsettles like Woodward: he does so through no easy surrealism, but instead an extraordinary ability to render our home the alien planet it is, and give conscious voice and vivid shape to the terrible sense of precariousness that lies just below our waking state.
Caravan Thieves
Most of these vivid and unsettling stories are rooted in apparently everyday lives and situations, but suddenly become surreal or disturbing - reading them feels sometimes as though you're walking along in the real world and suddenly step off an edge into a void, where rules of gravity and normality have disappeared.
August
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