Shouting at the Window
A man takes a train journey between two (unnamed) cities. Haynes - we only ever get to know his surname - is on the margins of society: a petty criminal, living from day-to-day, who has had to flee from his usual territory to somewhere more secure...
On the Carousel
On the Carousel is the story of a young man’s journey through the decade – against the background of Thatcherism and Madonna and Cabbage Patch Dolls – as he enjoys the benefits of success, but then starts to re-assess his values and priorities...
Latest from the Blog
The Director by Daniel Kehlmann (2023)
11th September 2026 This is a fictionalised account of some of the episodes in the life of GW (Georg Wilhelm) Pabst, a successful film director in Weimar Germany, his Pandora’s Box (1929) acclaimed as a classic of the silent cinema. In the early 1930s, many of his compatriots in the industry flee the antisemitism of…
NW by Zadie Smith (2012)
9th August 2026 This novel is firmly set in Willesden and its environs – inner north-west London – where the author was born in 1975. From its opening pages, we are brought straight into the heart of the locale: its houses, streets, shops and ethnic complexity, its uneasy (and imbalanced) combination of aspiration and desperation…
The Valley of Fear by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1915)
15th July 2026 The Valley of Fear was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fourth and final “long” Sherlock Holmes novel, appearing roughly two-thirds of the way through the canon of 56 short stories that ran from A Scandal in Bohemia in 1891 to The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place in 1927. The book is in two…
JR Alexander 