Rancid Aluminium

Literature & Fiction

Hawes, James

Contemporary

Vintage

Take four ne'er-do-wells: a 28-year-old ex-public schoolboy who can't bear the idea of setting down; Suzy the Black Widow, who has a deliciously flat stomach and drives like she's breathing through the carbs; Brady the Reservoir Dogs fetishist; and Chico the fat Portuguese waiter. Add some plastic guns, the IRA and a white Merc with fins and you have a plan. What plan? The plan to walk into Michael Winner's private bank and walk out with half a million quid. Fast, clever, stylish, funny and utterly compulsive, this is a first novel with everything.

A White Merc with Fins

JONATHAN CAPE.

A lively novel about a man's stressful but ordinary life suddenly spinning out of control. By the author of "A White Merc With Fins".

Rancid Aluminum

RANDOM HOUSE UK

This is the third novel from James Hawes. His first two novels, A White Merc with Fins and Rancid Aluminium are currently being filmed.

Dead Long Enough

Speak for England

James Hawes' wonderful new novel begins with its protagonist Brian Marley, a divorced, ineffectual teacher, all alone in a jungle about to die live on television. A reluctant contestant on Brit Pluck, Green Hell, Seven Figures, the ultimate reality TV show, Marley has somehow managed to outlive his rivals and win two million quid. Except that the helicopter sent to bring him back to civilization has crashed, and he's on his own, with a portable camera, at the foot of a monstrously tall cliff. He has no option but to start climbing...To his astonishment, Marley doesn't die, although the world he finds at the top of that cliff is remarkably like an Englishman's version of heaven. T here's cricket and rugger, the Union Jack, plucky boys, pretty girls, a tough but fair headmaster - an entire miniature civilization created by the surviving passengers from Comet IV, an airliner which vanished in 1958 carrying a jolly gang of youngsters to a public schools jamboree in Australia. Believing that they were one of the first casualties of World War III, they have survived in their jungle fastness for nearly fifty years, sustained by the Book of Common Prayer and good old English values. Hawes' telling of this tale is as tellingly funny as anything he has ever written, but when Brian's rescuers do find him at last, when the world of the Daily Star confronts that of the Eagle, when the Prime Minister, spotting an opportunity for a sound-bite, meets the Headmaster, the novel shifts gear into a glorious satire worthy of Evelyn Waugh. The Observer called James Hawes 'the funniest British novelist writing today'. Speak for England proves it, over and over again.

Everybody knows the face of Franz Kafka, whether they have read any of his works or not. And that brooding face carries instant images: bleak and threatening visions of an inescapable bureaucracy, nightmarish transformations, uncanny predictions of the Holocaust. But while Kafka’s genius is beyond question, the image of a mysterious, sickly, shadowy figure who was scarcely known in his own lifetime bears no resemblance to the historical reality. Franz Kafka was a popular and well-connected millionaire’s son who enjoyed good-time girls, brothels, and expensive porn, who landed a highly desirable state job that pulled in at least $90,000 a year in today’s dollars for a six-hour day, who remained a loyal member of Prague’s German-speaking Imperial elite right to the end, and whose work was backed by a powerful literary clique.
Here are some of the prevalent Kafka myths:
*Kafka was the archetypal genius neglected in his lifetime.
*Kafka was lonely.
*Kafka was stuck in a dead-end job, struggling to find time to write. 
*Kafka was tormented by fear of sex.
*Kafka was unbendingly honest about himself to the women in his life – too honest.
*Kafka had a terrible, domineering father who had no understanding of his son’s needs.
*Kafka’s style is mysterious and opaque.
*Kafka takes us into bizarre worlds. 
James Hawes wants to tear down the critical walls which generations of gatekeepers---scholars, biographers, and tourist guides---have built up around Franz Kafka, giving us back the real man and the real significance of his splendid works. And he'll take no prisoners in the process.

Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

St.Martin's Press

Brian Marley should be counting his winnings as victor of Britain’s ultimate reality TV show. Instead, he’s stranded on a jungle island after a helicopter crash wipes out the television crew. His ill-fated luck takes a turn when he falls from a precarious cliff and lands in a lost world. Awaking in a village founded by survivors of a 1958 airplane crash, Brian discovers an idyllic community modeled after pre-Sixties England and overseen by the stern but judicious Headmaster. But when he uncovers the Headmaster’s methods of survival, the village’s quaint idealism proves to be founded on something far more sinister. With rescue imminent, Brian finds himself at the center of a clash between English cultures separated by fifty years of history. Satirical and insightful, Speak for England explores the changing world by asking whether it ever really changes at all.

Speak For England: The Great New Smash Hit Story

World Literature

Anchor Canada

The dazzling debut of a new voice in fiction, this is the funny, unexpected story of a balding, thickening 28-year-old who, having spent the bulk of his twenties avoiding a career in the quasi-black market of London's temp agencies, now finds himself not only without a job, but seriously without prospects. How he solves this problem is the action that propels this witty, acutely observant and captivating first novel.

United States

Pantheon

The dazzling debut of a new voice in fiction, this is the funny, unexpected story of a balding, thickening 28-year-old who, having spent the bulk of his twenties avoiding a career in the quasi-black market of London's temp agencies, now finds himself not only without a job, but seriously without prospects. How he solves this problem is the action that propels this witty, acutely observant and captivating first novel. From the Hardcover edition.

A completely fresh look at the culture clash between Britain and Germany that all but destroyed Europe. Half a century before 1914, most Britons saw the Germans as poor and rather comical cousins - and most Germans looked up to the British as their natural mentors. Over the next five decades, each came to think that the other simply had to be confronted - in Europe, in Africa, in the Pacific and at last in the deadly race to cover the North Sea with dreadnoughts. But why? Why did so many Britons come to see in Germany everything that was fearful and abhorrent? Why did so many Germans come to see any German who called dobbel fohltwhile playing Das Lawn Tennisas the dupe of a global conspiracy? Packed with long-forgotten stories such as the murder of Queen Victoria's cook in Bohn, the disaster to Germany's ironclads under the White Cliffs, bizarre early colonial clashes and the precise, dark moment when Anglophobia begat modern anti-Semitism, this is the fifty-year saga of the tragic, and often tragicomic, delusions and miscalculations that led to the defining cataclysm of our times - the breaking of empires and the womb of horrors, the Great War. Richly illustrated with the words and pictures that formed our ancestors' disastrous opinions, it will forever change the telling of this fateful tale.

Englanders and Huns: The Culture-Clash which Led to the First World War

History

Military

Simon Schuster(uk)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hawes, James. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Hawes, James

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hawes, James. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Rancid Aluminium

A White Merc with Fins

Rancid Aluminum

Dead Long Enough

Speak for England

Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life

Speak For England: The Great New Smash Hit Story

A White Merc with Fins

A White Merc with Fins

Englanders and Huns: The Culture-Clash which Led to the First World War