Search results for ""Author Barney Norris""

A Times bestseller'Wonderful...I was hooked from the first page. It's the real stuff.' - Michael Frayn'Deeply affecting' - Guardian'Superb' - Mail on Sunday'Barney Norris is a rare and precious talent' - Evening Standard'There exists in all of us a song waiting to be sung which is as heart-stopping and vertiginous as the peak of the cathedral. That is the meaning of this quiet city, where the spire soars into the blue, where rivers and stories weave into one another, where lives intertwine.'One quiet evening in Salisbury, the peace is shattered by a serious car crash. At that moment, five lives collide – a flower seller, a schoolboy, an army wife, a security guard, a widower – all facing their own personal disasters. As one of those lives hangs in the balance, the stories of all five unwind, drawn together by connection and coincidence into a web of love, grief, disenchantment and hope that perfectly represents the joys and tragedies of small town life.Barney Norris's third novel, The Vanishing Hours, will be published in July 2019.

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Barney Norris was born in Sussex in 1987, and grew up in Salisbury. Upon leaving university he founded the theatre company Up In Arms. He won the Critics' Circle and Offwestend Awards for Most Promising Playwright for his debut full-length play Visitors. He is the Martin Esslin Playwright in Residence at Keble College, Oxford.

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Barney Norris was born in Sussex in 1987, and grew up in Salisbury. Upon leaving university he founded the theatre company Up In Arms. He won the Critics' Circle and Offwestend Awards for Most Promising Playwright for his debut full-length play Visitors. He is the Martin Esslin Playwright in Residence at Keble College, Oxford.

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I wish there could be a day where families came together and just said it all to each other. Because then everyone would know it all, and there'd be nothing left to hurt anyone.Sussex. London. Wiltshire. Northamptonshire. Wales. Over three decades, a family spreads across the country, and the chord they made together starts to fray, the distance between them changing the music of their lives.Barney Norris's We Started to Sing is a love song to the people who raised him, and a hymn to the bravery of our brief lives. The play premiered at the Arcola Theatre, London, in May 2022.

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The deeply moving second novel from the author of the award-winning FIVE RIVERS MET ON A WOODED PLAIN.'Courageous...memorable...moving' - Guardian'One of our most exciting young writers' - The Times'Life-affirming, beautiful and achingly poignant' - Donal Ryan'Isn’t the life of any person made up out of the telling of two tales, after all? The whole world makes more sense if you remember that everyone has two lives, their real lives and their dreams, both stories only a tape’s breadth apart from each other, impossibly divided, indivisibly close.'Every year, Robert's family comes together at a rambling old house to celebrate his birthday. Aunts, uncles, distant cousins - it has been a milestone in their lives for decades. But this year Robert doesn't want to be reminded of what has happened since they last met - and nor, for quite different reasons, does his granddaughter Kate. Neither of them is sure they can face the party. But for both Robert and Kate, it may become the most important gathering of all.As lyrical and true to life as Norris's critically acclaimed debut Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain, which won a Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and Debut of the Year at the British Book Awards, this is a compelling, emotional story of family, human frailty, and the marks that love leaves on us.

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I think the local community's supportive. Yeah, of like, good stuff. Bric-a-brac sales and choral singing and local elections and swingers' parties, not you and me messing about with a drum kit.Joe, Ross and Ellie used to be in a band. They were pretty good too, making waves across a rugged patchwork of pubs and clubs. They even had a song on Radio 2. But that was all a long time ago and the songs, the stories, the secrets are long since buried. Time has thrown the three friends far from their younger selves.Back together for one night only to play a benefit gig in their home town, they find a community reeling from a poisoning and a pandemic. And as they rehearse the old songs, the stories and secrets must also be excavated.The Band Back Together premiered in a touring production by Farnham Maltings in March 2024.

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'Shot through with compassion . . . this dreamlike, winding tale is a joy.' A. L. KENNEDY 'Moving and unconventionally wise.' Guardian________________________This was how I heard the most important story of my life, the thing that decided me, the story that determined who I was in the end.As snow begins to fall outside, two strangers meet by chance in a bar. She is trying to make sense of a life shaken by heartbreak and ruined dreams. He is on a desperate quest to find something he lost in his youth.From the blustery cliffs of Dover to the confines of a nuclear bunker; from the courtroom witness box to the West End stage, he flits from one life to another, never able to stand still.Extraordinary though his story is, the secret she is keeping is even more surprising, and will take them to a place neither of them - or you - expected.From the bestselling author of FIVE RIVERS MET ON A WOODED PLAIN comes this captivating novel about love, abandonment, and the power of stories to help us find our way in the world.________________________What readers are saying:***** 'I absolutely loved this book - it's beautifully written, very emotional and full of wonderful flights of imagination.'***** 'Unlike anything I've read before.'***** 'A deeply moving account of fragile memory and lost love.'***** 'A completely beautiful book . . . I adored it.'

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'Lyrical' Daily Mail'Beautiful' Spectator'Skilled' Financial Times'Vulnerable' Guardian'Deft' Independent'Profound' Observer'The beginning of summer. Perhaps it crosses my mind even now while I wait for news of Amy that something is coming towards us. Like sighting the first slow swell of a wave.'Years ago, in an almost accidental moment of heroism, Ed saved Amy from drowning. Now, in his thirties, he finds himself adrift. He's been living in London for years - some of them good - but he's stuck in a relationship he can't move forward, has a job that just pays the bills, and can't shake the sense that life should mean more than this. Perhaps all Ed needs is a moment to pause. To exhale and start anew. And when he meets Amy again by chance, it seems that happiness might not be so far out of reach. But then tragedy overtakes him, and Ed must decide whether to let history and duty define his life, or whether he should push against the tide and write his own story.Filled with hope and characteristic warmth, Undercurrent is a moving and intimate portrait of love, of life and why we choose to share ours with the people we do.

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Barney Norris has been the recipient of the International Theatre Institute's Award for Excellence, the Critics' Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright, a South Bank Sky Arts Times Breakthrough Award, an Evening Standard Progress 1000 Award, a Betty Trask Award and the Northern Ireland One Book Award. His work has been translated into eight languages. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, teaches Creative Writing at the University of Oxford where he is the Martin Esslin Playwright in Residence at Keble College, Oxford, and regularly reviews fiction for the Guardian.

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