Billy Liar

Penguin Decades bring you the novels that helped shape modern Britain. When they were published, some were bestsellers, some were considered scandalous, and others were simply misunderstood. All represent their time and helped define their generation, while today each is considered a landmark work of storytelling. Keith Waterhouse's Billy Liar was published in 1959, and captures brilliantly the claustrophobic atmosphere of a small town. It tells the story of Billy Fisher, a Yorkshire teenager unable to stop lying - especially to his three girlfriends. Trapped by his boring job and working-class parents, Billy finds that his only happiness lies in grand plans for his future and fantastical day-dreams of the fictional country Ambrosia.

WATERHOUSE, Keith

Literature & Fiction

Penguin Uk

Billy Liar On The Moon

Contemporary

Penguin Books, Ltd.

Billy Liar (Penguin Decades)

Humor & Satire

The classic comedy of a 50s youth trapped inside a Walter Mitty fantasy-world, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. Keith Waterhouse's Billy Liar was published in 1959, and captures brilliantly the claustrophobic atmosphere of a small town. It tells the story of Billy Fisher, a Yorkshire teenager unable to stop lying - especially to his three girlfriends. Trapped by his boring job and working-class parents, Billy finds that his only happiness lies in grand plans for his future and fantastical day-dreams of the fictional country Ambrosia.

Billy Liar (Penguin Essentials)

VIKING

Our Song

Roger Piper is married, middle-aged and middle-rung; he is a man who has elevated failure to an art form. His wife thinks he is up all night writing a novel. In fact, he's writing a suicide note, a long farewell letter to Angela Caxton, the girl with the marmalade-coloured hair, with whom he has shared a wild but hopeless affair. OUR SONG traces their entanglement from its carefree beginnings to its inevitable yet unexpected tragic end. Pouring out his heart, the former advertising executive - his career, as well as much else, sacrificed to the consuming trauma of his obsessive relationship - looks back upon the astonishing helter-skelter experience of falling unsuitably but violently in love.

London: Hodder and Stoughton

History

World

TRAFALGAR SQUARE +

Bimbo

Hodder&Stoughton

Sceptre

Keith Waterhouse was born in a world that has now vanished - a soot-blackened, tramcar-rattling provincial city. It happened to be Leeds. Waterhouse was a true city-boy, deeply mistrustful of grass and trees. In early childhood, he would roam the covered markets, the carillon-chiming arcades. As a youth he came to know the cinemas and the theatres. Then, as a junior reporter, he trod the tiled corridors of civic power. Moving "down south", his first impression of London was the sign in Piccadilly Circus; picked out in electric light bulbs, it was a heart-warming replica of the Bovril sign in Leeds. Keith Waterhouse gives a vivid impression of his younger self in what is as much the record of a city and a bygone era as of a person.

City Lights: A Street Life

Biographies & Memoirs

Hodder&Stoughton Canada

Continuing the first volume of his memoirs in "City Lights", Keith Waterhouse records his arrival in Fleet Street in the early 1950s. He evokes an almost Dickensian world of clanking printing works, but one in which he sensed profound social change was soon to manifest itself in an explosion of New Wave books, plays and films like "Lucky Jim", "Look Back in Anger" and his own "Billy Liar". Reliving the excitement of its success, his partnership with Willis Hall, writing for the theatre, screen and television, and their sojourn in Hollywood, Waterhouse creates an impression of an eventful and exhausting era.

Streets ahead: Life after City lights

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Books by WATERHOUSE, Keith