Search results for ""author joseph connolly""
Quercus Publishing This Is It
His girlfriend commands that he marry her. His wife demands him home in time for tea. His blackmailer commandeers half of his secret earnings. Then he gets hit by a bus. All in all, it's not a good day for Eric. And once he's on crutches, it becomes impossible to juggle two lives, three women and one vicious gangster. Eric's double-decker life and triple-tangled lies drive him to a catastrophic collision in Joseph Connolly's wry and ingeniously plotted black comedy.
£10.04
Quercus Publishing Stuff
A successful day for Emily - interior designer and total bitch - is throttling her husband Kevin and tormenting his best friend Raymond to their mutual satisfaction. A good day for Raymond is venting his frustrations on Emily's fine form and getting a glimpse of her even finer daughter Shelley. A tolerable day for Kevin is just avoiding Emily - until he meets a surprising young woman who sees through his dim wits to the kindly man beneath...Emily's a maelstrom of malice, but there's only so far she can push Kevin and Raymond before the storm finally breaks. Stripping the veneer of pretension and civility, Connolly's thrillingly repulsive characters are unveiled through breathless interior monologue to reveal the genuine and grotesque urges that drive them all into a violent climax.
£10.04
Quercus Publishing This Is 64
THE NEW NOVEL FROM THE BOLLINGER SHORTLISTED AUTHOR OF ENGLAND'S LANE.'There's a lot of brilliantly observed detail... it's very funny and very sharp' Michael PalinGeorge is a fashion mad Beatles fan, selfish and cruel. Why his girlfriend Dorothy loves him is a mystery to her and to his best friend Sammy. When George callously chucks her he cannot anticipate that his life, post 1964, will never be the same. And forty-four years later, when George is sixty-four, rich and successful, his past will catch up with him and his family.'Connolly unfolds a rich and compelling drama of life that is anything but everyday' Daily Mail'It is Connolly's skill to get the reader to laugh at what should make you cry or at least wince' Times Literary Supplement
£10.04
Quercus Publishing Jack the Lad and Bloody Mary
London, 1939. Mary and Jack. In love, unmarried and happy. Until the outbreak of the Second World War. Jackie, ever the lad, is bent on escaping conscription, but the contacts he makes drag him ever deeper into a dangerous criminal underworld. Yet it is Mary who undertakes the most surprising transformation. Despite striving for normality, she must confront a set of choices that will lead to a backstreet abortion and an unexpected vocation. With every tone and cadence of this novel, from wireless to air-raid siren, Connolly conducts with masterful hand and compassionate grace the voices of a once hopeful working class couple - now blitzed, battered and breaking into a desperate new dawn.
£10.04
Quercus Publishing Love is Strange
In the kitchen Gillian loads the Hotpoint and frets about letting her baby go. In the bathroom Clifford styles his hair like Cliff's and wishes for a television. In the front room Arthur smokes a pipe and plots to fend off the loan sharks. In her bedroom Annette lifts up her nightie and heads for Clifford's room. In a tour-de-force of undressed taboo, four monologues intertwine to begin the story of an ordinary family in the fifties. How their seemingly contented, simple world bubbles under with odd desires and secret pangs - how it is shaken when they come to light - and how, step by step with the dawning sixties, life for all of them is whirled into a carousel of fashion, debauchery and explosive revelation.
£8.09
Quercus Publishing Boys and Girls
Susan wants another husband. Which comes as a shock to the current one. 'But not instead of you, Alan, my sugar - as well as. You see?' Yet once Susan has brazenly commandeered her boss's rich, elderly hand, Alan finds himself curiously cherishing the company - sharing wife, whisky and other, odder peccadilloes. Indeed Susan is forced to root out alternative amusements - and with their teenage daughter copying her disintegrating moral code, the complex machinery of their lives soon begins to break down. Joseph Connolly plunges the reader into a tumultuous medley of inner monologues with keen, unabashed relish; exposing marital bedroom and male bonding in this biting, excruciatingly funny observation of men, women and adolescent girls.
£8.99
Quercus Publishing Style
Terence is sick of people making a fuss of Alexander. His looks. His money. His fame.Who wouldn't resent so successful a son?Even if he is only ten years old.Joseph Connolly's brilliant new comedy of manners weaves together a domestic tableaux of characters - those with old-fashioned manners, tabloid manners, and no manners at all - in a satire on oedipal envy, neighbourly rivalry and the shameless stupidity of our fame-fuelled society.
£9.37
Quercus Publishing England's Lane
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOLLINGER EVERYMAN WODEHOUSE PRIZE - AS IF THE ROYLE FAMILY WERE WRITTEN BY MARTIN AMIS!'Vibrant tragicomic slices of cosmopolitan Englishness' Independent on Sunday'A rich and compelling drama of life' Daily Mail'Connolly has a keen sense of the hushed emotional tenderness of English life and our silent shattering pain' Sunday TelegraphJim and Milly. Stan and Jane. Jonathan and Fiona. Winter, 1959. Three married couples: each living in England's Lane, each with an only child, and each attending to family, and their livelihoods - the ironmonger's, the sweetshop and the butcher's. Each of them hiding their lies, disguising sin, coping in the only way they know how.
£10.04
