SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2023, THE NERO BOOK AWARDS 2023 AND WINNER OF THE IRISH BOOK AWARDS NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2023

‘A tragicomic triumph. You won’t read a sadder, truer, funnier novel this year’ Guardian

The Barnes family are in trouble. Until recently they ran the biggest business in town, now they’re teetering on the brink of bankruptcy – and that’s just the start of their problems. Dickie and Imelda’s marriage is hanging by a thread; straight-A student Cass is careening off the rails; PJ is hopelessly in debt to the school bully. Meanwhile the ghosts of old mistakes are rising out of the past to meet them, but everyone’s too wrapped up in the present to see the danger looming . . .

‘Generous, immersive, sharp-witted and devastating; the sort of novel that becomes a friend for life’ Financial Times

‘Paul Murray [is] the undisputed reigning champion of epic Irish tragicomedy’ Spectator

‘An instant classic’ Washington Post

‘[An] astute, remorselessly funny novel’ Daily Mirror

‘A wagyu steak of a novel . . . A classic in the mode of The Corrections’ The Times

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The most scandalous Royal book of the year

In a rapidly changing world the Royal Family own swathes of the country, most of the seabed and more money than anyone could ever spend. It is the role of the Chamberlain of the NDAs to keep things that way.

From transgressions to successions, travesties to majesties, follow eighteen months in the life of trusted toady Fenton Footlicker Esquire as he takes Queen Elizabeth to rehab, foils a breakout from the Balmoral Labour Camp and runs a counter-espionage unit of royal lookalikes – the Crown Duals.

Fenton knows better than anyone that without the monarchy UK tourism would instantly collapse. Which is why he calls himself the Royal Flush: because he always cleans up the messes his charges leave behind.

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It is fifty years in the future and the individual nations of Europe no longer exist. New Democracy rules. Elections are considered divisive and a thing of the past, power has been fully centralised, and cheerful Controllers make the decisions for the good of the masses. Conformity means freedom. Big smiles, easy debt and lots of nice words mask a corporate-driven, closet dictatorship. When special police unit Cool come to take you away they arrive with fresh coffee and blueberry muffins. But resistance groups are fighting back.

In London, ambitious young bureaucrat Rupert Ronsberger uses Suspicion software to identify threats to the system, stumbling across a shocking murder just as Controller Horace is about to arrive in the city. At the same time Kenny Jackson – a member of the outlawed GB45 – leaves a free town in the West Country and heads towards the capital. Despite the best efforts of Cool, the three men are set on a collision course.

The Liberal Politics Of Adolf Hitler predicts a time when the internet is embedded in the human body, having morphed into propaganda/surveillance tool InterZone; correct thinking and a denied censorship crushes individual expression; physical books, audio and film are illegal; the people’s culture is cancelled or sold back to them in distorted forms; and enforced digitisation has seen history edited, deleted and rewritten, so that even the most wicked of individuals can be reinvented.

John King’s dystopian novel imagines a future firmly rooted in the present day, and is a dark satire that merges absurdity and humour with the terrors of a new brand of totalitarianism made possible by Big Tech – a nightmare society that we should see coming.

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This edition is releasing to celebrate the release of the award winning film adaptation, starring Hermione Corfield, Will Fletcher and Mark Gatiss and directed by Richie Adams. Cinematic release set for May 2022 in UK and Irish cinemas. Winner of the Edinburgh International Film Festival Audience Award 2021.

Life in the Scottish Hebrides can be harsh – the edge of the world some call it. For the beautiful Kirsty Macleod, the love of Murdo and their dreams of America promise an escape from the scrape of the land, the repression of the Church and the inevitability of the path their lives would take.

But as the Great War looms Murdo is conscripted. The villagers hold a grand Road Dance to send their young men off to battle. As the dancers swirl and sup, the wheels of tragedy are set in motion.

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‘The much loved comic proves adept at noirish fiction in a debut whose surrealist humour sets it apart’ – Observer

‘Like Spike Milligan, Mortimer has managed to use a novel for his distinctive comedic voice’ – The Telegraph 
 
‘Hilarious’ – Daily Mail
 
‘You’ll love it’ – Independent

My name is Gary. I’m a thirty-year-old legal assistant with a firm of solicitors in London. To describe me as anonymous would be unfair but to notice me other than in passing would be a rarity. I did make a good connection with a girl, but that blew up in my face and smacked my arse with a fish slice.

Gary Thorn goes for a pint with a work acquaintance called Brendan. When Brendan leaves early, Gary meets a girl in the pub. He doesn’t catch her name, but falls for her anyway. When she suddenly disappears without saying goodbye, all Gary has to remember her by is the book she was reading: The Satsuma Complex. But when Brendan goes missing, Gary needs to track down the girl he now calls Satsuma to get some answers.

And so begins Gary’s quest, through the estates and pie shops of South London, to finally bring some love and excitement into his unremarkable life…

A page-turning story with a cast of unforgettable characters, The Satsuma Complex is the brilliantly funny smash hit first novel by bestselling author and comedian Bob Mortimer.
 

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Review At last, a reader who does it justice . . . Peter Kenny is the one reader (I’ve heard five) who brings out Banks’s glorious sardonic wit. Good things are worth waiting for (Sue Arnold, GUARDIAN) A Gothic horror story of quite exceptional quality…macabre, bizarre and…quite impossible to put down (FINANCIAL TIMES) A mighty imagination has arrived on the scene (MAIL on Sunday) Book Description Iain Banks’ momentous first novel, published in 1984. From the Back Cover Enter if you can bear it – the extraordinary world of Frank, just sixteen and unconventional to say the least ‘Two years after I killed Blyth, I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different reasons and more fundamental reasons than I’d disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did my young cousin Esmeralda, more or less on a whim. That’s my score to date. Three. I haven’t killed anybody for years, and don’t intend to ever again. It was just a stage I was going through.’ About the Author Iain Banks came to widespread and controversial public notice with the publication of his first novel, THE WASP FACTORY, in 1984. He gained enormous popular and critical acclaim for both his mainstream and his science fiction novels. Iain Banks died in June 2013. Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. I had been making the rounds of the Sacrifice Poles _the day we heard my brother had escaped. I already knew something was going to happen; the Factory told me. At the north end of the island, near the tumbled remains of the slip where the handle of the rusty winch still creaks in an easterly wind, I had two Poles on the far face of the last dune. One of the Poles held a rat head with two dragonflies, the other a seagull and two mice. I was just sticking one of the mouse heads back on when the birds went up into the evening air, kaw-calling and screaming, wheeling over the path through the dunes where it went near their nests. I made sure the head was secure, then clambered to the top of the dune to watch with my binoculars. Diggs, the policeman from the town, was coming down the path on his bike, pedalling hard, his head down as the wheels sank part way into the sandy surface. He got off the bike at the bridge and left it propped against the suspension cables, then walked to the middle of the swaying bridge, where the gate is. I could see him press the button on the phone. He stood for a while, looking round about at the quiet dunes and the settling birds. He didn’t see me, because I was too well hidden. Then my father must have answered the buzzer in the house, because Diggs stooped slightly and talked into the grille beside the button, and then pushed the gate open and walked over the bridge, on to the island and down the path towards the house. When he disappeared behind the dunes I sat for a while, scratching my crotch as the wind played with my hair and the birds returned to their nests. I took my catapult from my belt, selected a half-inch steelie, sighted carefully, then sent the big ball-bearing arcing out over the river, the telephone poles and the little suspension bridge to the mainland. The shot hit the ‘Keep Out – Private Property’ sign with a thud I could just hear, and I smiled. It was a good omen. The Factory hadn’t been specific (it rarely is), but I had the feeling that whatever it was warning me about was important, and I also suspected it would be bad, but I had been wise enough to take the hint and check my Poles, and now I knew my aim was still good; things were still with me. I decided not to go straight back to the house. Father didn’t like me to be there when Diggs came and, anyway, I still had a couple of Poles to check before the sun went down. I jumped and slid down the slope of the dune into its shadow, then turned at the bottom to look back up at those small heads and bodies as they watched over the northern approaches to the island. They looked fine, those husks on their gnarled branches. Black ribbons tied to the wooden limbs blew softly in the breeze, waving at me. I decided nothing would be too bad, and that tomorrow I would ask the Factory for more information. If I was lucky, my father might tell me something and, if I was luckier still, it might even be the truth. I left the sack of heads and bodies in the Bunker just as the light was going completely and the stars were starting to come out. The birds had told me Diggs had left a few minutes earlier, so I ran back the quick way to the house, where the lights all burned as usual. My father met me in the kitchen. ‘Diggs was just here. I suppose you know.’ He put the stub of the fat cigar he had been smoking under the cold tap, turned the water on for a second while the brown stump sizzled and died, then threw the sodden remnant in the bin. I put my things down on the big table and sat down, shrugging. My father turned up the ring on the cooker under the soup-pan, looking beneath the lid into the warming mixture and then turning back to look at me. There was a layer of grey-blue smoke in the room at about shoulder level, and a big wave in it, probably produced by me as I came in through the double doors of the back porch. The wave rose slowly between us while my father stared at me. I fidgeted, then looked down, toying with the wrist-rest of the black catapult. It crossed my mind that my father looked worried, but he was good at acting and perhaps that was just what he wanted me to think, so deep down I remained unconvinced. ‘I suppose I’d better tell you,’ he said, then turned away again, taking up a wooden spoon and stirring the soup. I waited. ‘It’s Eric.’ Then I knew what had happened. He didn’t have to tell me the rest. I suppose I could have thought from the little he’d said up until then that my half-brother was dead, or ill, or that something had happened to him, but I knew then it was something Eric had done, and there was only one thing he could have done which would make my father look worried. He had escaped. I didn’t say anything, though.

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