Showing results by author "D.J. Taylor" in Literature & Fiction

Thirteen bibliomysteries by best-selling and award-winning authors are contained in this first of volume of a must-listen collection.

Some of the characters in Stewkey Blues have lived in Norfolk all their lives. Others are short-term residents or passage migrants. Whether young or old, self-confident or ground-down, local or blow-in, all of them are reaching uneasy compromises with the world they inhabit and the landscape in which that life takes place.

As the shadows lengthen over the June grass, all England is heading for Epsom Downs - high life and low life, society beauties and Whitechapel street girls, bookmakers and gypsies, hawkers and acrobats, punters and thieves. Whole families stream along the Surrey back-roads, towards the greatest race of the year. Hopes are high, nerves are taut, hats are tossed in the air - this is Derby Day.

Since its publication nearly 70 years ago, George Orwell’s 1984 has been regarded as one of the most influential novels of the modern age. Politicians have testified to its influence on their intellectual identities, rock musicians have made records about it, TV viewers watch a reality show named for it, and a White House spokesperson tells of “alternative facts”.

Rock and Roll is Life is a vastly entertaining, picaresque and touching novel inspired by the excess and trajectories of the great '60s and '70s supergroups, and of the tales brought back from the front line by a very special breed of Englishmen who made it big in the States as the alchemists and enablers, as well as the old making way for the new in the era of the baby boomers. At its heart is one man's adventure, and the poignancy of the special relationships that dominate his life.

A taut and gripping thriller: King Edward VIII is on the throne and keen to broker peace at any cost - WWII could turn out very differently.... As the storm clouds gather over Europe and German troops are amassing, a clandestine 'King's Party' of fascist peace campaigners is stealthily undermining the war effort. Back from Ceylon to work on a newly founded literary magazine, Cynthia Kirkpatrick finds herself at the centre of a web of intrigue. London shivers with uncertainty. As Hitler's troops encroach further into Europe, Cynthia soon discovers that taking sides can be a very dangerous business.

Welcome to a London on the cusp of the 21st century. And meet Anthony, Alison and Lucy. Anthony is the disillusioned junior partner of a city insolvency firm; Alison is his PR-director wife; Lucy is the girl he has secretly been in love with for the past 17 years. This is the story of how Anthony and Lucy are brought together again and the emotional consequences for the people involved.

Wrote for Luck ranges from North Norfolk to Chicago, from sordid old antique dealers to glamorous young writers, from glorious local gossips to frustrated academics. The stories abound with gleeful absurdity and waspish humour. But they are also rich in melancholy and the heady sadness of people struggling to find places in the world. Some are fascinatingly strange; others are uncomfortably familiar. Some are simply hilarious - and all are touchingly human.

It's 1978 and Nick Du Pont, one-time PR man to Sixties rock behemoths the Helium Kids, is back in London and bent on founding his own record label. A new kind of music—sharp, hard and dangerous—is bursting onto the airwaves on both sides of the Atlantic and Nick wants a slice of the action—in particular, the work of The Flame Throwers, the most provocative assemblage of street-smart desperadoes ever to hail from downtown Los Angeles.