Sean Tallow has only two overriding desires in life. One is to step into the shoes of his glamorous friend Daniel Pagett, and the other is to establish the truth about the School of Night, a shadowy group of Elizabethans who clustered around Sir Walter Ralegh. Tallow pursues the School of Night and its entanglement in the question of whether the man from Stratford-on-Avon could really have written the plays ascribed to William Shakespeare. If he didn't, then who did? The harder he studies, the less light is thrown on this troublesome question, and the more his interest in the School of Night becomes a grim fixation. Just when it seems Tallow is ready to give up the quest, day becomes night and everything he once believed is turned on its head as he enters a fearful world where there are no longer any rules except survival. Like the original members of the School of Night, he finds himself treading on the wrong side of the law.

The School of Night: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Wall, Alan

British & Irish

Thomas Dunne Books

St. Martin's: Griffin

Digby Walton was once the heir to an English pottery company. Now in old age he contemplates the history of that company as he reflects upon the modern world. His own heir, his son Theo, would rather ignore history completely and lose himself in smoky jazz clubs with his trumpet. Theo wants to live entirely inside the perfection of songs, but will reality let him? Meanwhile Digby's next-door neighbor, Daisy Gresham, famed as one of the great film beauties of her day, seeks her own elusive son, who is perilously engaged in the international anarchist movement. Alan Wall's novel weaves back and forth between the present and the twentieth century that formed it, its wars and industries, industries that once propelled an empire but now appear in permanent decline, asking constantly what art contributes to life and whether life can ever survive for long without it. In the tradition of Louis Begley and John Updike, China is a novel about life and looking back.

China: A Novel

Digby Walton was once the heir to an English pottery company. Now in old age he contemplates the history of that company as he reflects upon the modern world. He stares with Ruskin's tragic eye at the society that surrounds him. His own heir is Theo, who wishes to ignore history and simply play trumpet in his jazz band Zeno. Theo wants to live entirely inside the perfection of songs, but the question is, will reality let him? Meanwhile Digby's next-door neighbour, Daisy Gresham, famed as one of the great film beauties of her day, seeks her own elusive son, perilously engaged in the international anarchist movement as he brings Ruskin's critique dangerously up to date. Alan Wall's novel weaves back and forth between the present and the twentieth century that formed it, its wars and industries, industries that once propelled an empire but now appear in permanent decline, asking constantly what art contributes to life and whether life can ever survive for long without it. Beneath the humour the range of themes is vast, from the Somme to contemporary rock music, from the first world to the third, from the Battle of Britain to September 11th.

China

Secker & Warbug

A first novel of remarkable ingenuity, Bless the Thief is a fast-paced literary mystery involving a secret society, art forgery, and the Hindenburg disaster. Born to an American mother and a British father, Tom Lynch lives with his mother in America until she sends him off to his appointed guardian in England, Patrick Grimshaw. Grimshaw becomes a surrogate father to Tom, who never knew his real father, and he inducts Tom into the mysterious Delaquay Society, an organization based on the works of Alfred Delaquay, a book illustrator of considerable genius and perversity. The books Delaquay illustrated were produced by hand, seldom in editions of more than one, and their reproduction or sale is prohibited by the Society. As its youngest-ever English secretary, Tom becomes increasingly involved with the Delaquay Society, until a breach of the Society's conventions of secrecy blows apart its hermetic and obsessively closed world and he is caught up in the resulting chaos. As the manner of his life begins to exact a heavy toll, so the Society takes its own terrible revenge, and Tom Lynch comes finally to understand who he really is and where he came from.

Bless the Thief

Literary

Crown

Badmouth

Contemporary

Harbour Books East Ltd

Loué soit le voleur

Flammarion

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