At the Jerusalem (King Penguin)

Literature & Fiction

Paul Bailey

Contemporary

Penguin Books, Ltd.

In the spring of 1985, the novelist Paul Bailey found himself becoming the unlikely owner of a dog. He saw the puppy in the window of a pet shop and was instantly (and lastingly) beguiled. She was given the name Circe by Bailey's dying partner, David, who was also overcome by her charms, though after a good deal of resistance. This memoir tells of the sixteen years Paul Bailey spent in Circe's company, while also offering portraits of friends and acquaintances, living and dead. There are sketches of the various eccentrics encountered during his walks with the dog, and descriptions of the author's trips abroad - to Romania, Poland, and Hungary, among other countries.

A Dog's Life

History & Criticism

Penguin??Books

Paul Bailey's remarkable account of growing up working class and gay in south London just after the war. His father had come back from WWI to find that he'd been abandonned by his wife, and in early middle age, working as a road sweepeer, he married a young servant girl. Bailey was one of three children brought up in such poverty that up to the middle of his adolescence he slept in the same bed as his father because of lack of space in the house. Nevertheless it was a happy, secure home which he protrays with great affection. The second strand of the book is his discovery at grammar school (he was the brains of the family) that he's homosexual - a discovery which didn't go down well in rigidly conventional Battersea. The book is extremely funny in places, evocative, and particularly moving in its portrait of the author's mother.

An Immaculate Mistake : Scenes from Childhood and Beyond

Biographies & Memoirs

Pasolini: A Biography

Enzo Siciliano

John Shepley

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

An autobiographical memoir, set for the most part in London in the 1940s and 50s, by the author of "At the Jerusalem", "Trespasses" and "An English Madam: The Life and Work of Cynthia Payne". It is composed of fifty scenes or fragments of memory which describe Bailey's parents, relatives, friends and acquaintances.

An immaculate mistake: Scenes from childhood and beyond

Bloomsbury Pub.

A new edition of the first novel of an author who has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Combining humour and pity, it creates the atmosphere of The Jerusalem, where old ladies have nothing to do except eat junket and die peacefully without fuss.

At the Jerusalem

Bloomsbury Pub Ltd, London

This is a portrait not only of old soldiers, but of old age in general. Other work by the author includes "A Distant Likeness", "Peter Smart's Confessions", "Gabriel's Lament", "Sugar Cane", and "An Immaculate Mistake".

Old Soldiers (Bloomsbury Classics)

BLOOMSBURY

Strengthen the Country and Enrich the People: The Reform Writings of Ma Jianzhong (Durham East Asia Series)

Routledge

So here he was at last, where he had long feared to be. Harry Chapman is not well, and he doesn't like hospitals. Superficially all is as it normally is in such places, with nurses to chide him and a priest to console. But there are more than usual quotient of voices - is it because of Dr Pereira's wonder drug that he can hear the voice of his mother, acerbic and disappointed in him as ever? Perhaps her presence would be understandable enough, but what is Pip from Great Expectations doing here? More and more voices add their differing notes and stories to the chorus, squabbling, cajoling, commenting: friends from childhood, lovers, characters from novels and poetry; his father, fighting in the First World War; Babar and Celeste, who dances with Fred Astaire; Jane Austen's "Emma"; his aunt Rose, 'a stranger to moodiness'; Christopher Smart's cat Jeoffrey; a man who wants to sell him T.S. Eliot's teeth; Virginia Woolf, the scourge of servants; and, of course, an old friend who turns up at his bedside principally to rehearse the litany of his own ailments. Slowly, endearingly, the life of Harry Chapman coalesces before our eyes, through voices real and unreal. Written with a gentle, effortless generosity, full of delicate observation, "Chapman's Odyssey" is the work of a master; a superbly rendered act of storytelling and ventriloquism that is waspish, witty, deeply moving and wise by turns and which constantly explores 'the unsolvable enigma of love'.

Chapman's Odyssey

Literary

Bloomsbury UK

The Prince's Boy

In May 1927, nineteen-year-old Dinu Grigorescu, a skinny boy with literary ambitions, is newly arrived in Paris. He has been sent from Bucharest, the city of his childhood, by his wealthy father to embark upon a bohemian adventure and relish the unique pleasures of Parisian life.  An innocent in a new city, still grieving the sudden loss of his beloved mother Elena seven years earlier, Dinu is encouraged to enjoy la vie de Bohème by his distant cousin, Eduard. But tentatively, secretly, Dinu is drawn to the Bains du Ballon d'Alsace, a notorious establishment rumored to offer the men of Paris, married or otherwise, who enjoy something different, everything they crave. It is here that he meets Razvan, a fellow Romanian, the adopted child of a man of refinement-a prince's boy-whose stories of Proust and other artists entrance Dinu, and who will become the young man's teacher in the ways of the world.  At a distance of forty years and written in London, his refuge from the horrors of Europe's early-twentieth-century history, Dinu's memoir of his brief spell in Paris is one of exploration and rediscovery. The love that blossomed that sunlit day in such inauspicious and unromantic surroundings would transcend lust, separation, despair, and even death to endure a lifetime. This is a work of extraordinary sensual delicacy, an exquisite novel from one of our most celebrated writers.

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Books by Paul Bailey