All My Precious Madness: Mark Bowles in conversation with Michael Lacey
All My Precious Madness: Mark Bowles in conversation with Michael Lacey
SKU:2094708
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ALL MY PRECIOUS MADNESS by Mark Bowles (published by Galley Beggar) is a startling, hilarious, moving novel and one of the most assured literary debuts in years - we're delighted to be welcome the author for a conversation around the book on Sunday, November 24th, from 4-6pm. Get a discounted copy of the book (or the audiobook from Spiracle) along with your ticket using the options on this page.
Incensed by the chattering, laptop-wielding hip young professionals whose blovations interfere with his quiet, contemplative espresso, the book's narrator unleashes a stream of invective and personal reminiscences; a book-length polemic against contemporary society that is scabrous, hilarious and underscored with a slow-building pathos that crescendoes in a hugely moving and human epilogue. Touching on social analysis, male fragility, the British class system and more, it is a bold, opinionated and philosophical book that nonetheless flows with a graceful readability.
Inviting favourable comparisons with the likes of Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Thomas Bernard, B.S. Johnson and more giants of literary misanthropy, ALL MY PRECIOUS MADNESS is the acerbic and intelligent story of a man at odds with the world. A man who wants to escape his violent past but instead – most emphatically – repeats it.
The son of a policeman turned council worker, Henry Nash has hauled his way from a working class childhood in Bradford, through an undergraduate degree at Oxford, and into adulthood and an academic elite. But still, he can’t escape his anger. As the world – and men in particular – continue to disappoint him, so does his rage grow in momentum until it becomes almost rapturous. And lethal.
A savagely funny novel that disdains literary and moral conventions, ALL MY PRECIOUS MADNESS is also a work of unusual care, craftsmanship and empathy – even if that also means understanding the darkest parts of humanity.
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