Blood-Dark Track

The debut novel from Joseph O'Neill, author of the Man Booker Prize longlisted and Richard & Judy pick, ‘Netherland’.

James Jones is slipping steadily through life. He has a steady job as a junior partner at a solicitor's firm, a steady girlfriend and a steady mortgage. Nothing much is happening in Jones's life but he really doesn't mind — this is exactly the way he likes it.

Michael Donovan, meanwhile, is a star — a world-class international lawyer and advocate — he's everything Jones wanted to be and isn't. Jones was once Donovan's pupil and, for a while, it looked like he too would make his name — but he left that high-powered world behind a long time ago, or so he thought.

One day Jones reads in the paper that Donovan has collapsed in court — then, out of the blue, Donovan contacts him; he has a job he needs Jones to work on…

Joseph O'Neill's debut is wonderfully clever and comic novel — about ambitions and aspirations and the realities that they inevitably collide with.

Fourteen years ago Mary Breeze was killed by lightning — it should have been all the bad luck that the Breeze family were due but, as John Breeze is about to find out, this couldn't be further from the truth. ‘The Breezes’ is John Breeze's account of his family's most hellish fortnight — when insurance policies, security systems and lucky underpants are pitted against redundancy, burglary and relegation — and lose. John (a failing chair-maker) and his father (railway manager and rubbish football referee) are only feebly equipped with shaky religious notions, management maxims and cynical postures as they try to come to terms with the absurd unfairness of lightning striking twice…

From the conflict between blind optimism and cynicism, to the urge to pretend that things just aren't happening, ‘The Breezes’ is wonderfully clever and comic novel about desperately trying to cope with the worst of bad luck.

In 2007, a New York attorney bumps into an old college buddy — and accepts his friend’s offer of a job in Dubai, as the overseer of an enormous family fortune. Haunted by the collapse of his relationship and hoping for a fresh start, our strange hero begins to suspect that he has exchanged one inferno for another.

A funny and wholly original work of international literature, is led by a brilliantly entertaining anti-hero. Imprisoned by his endless powers of reasoning, hemmed in by the ethical demands of globalized life, he is fatefully drawn towards the only logical response to our confounding epoch.

In a New York City made phantasmagorical by the events of 9/11, and left alone after his English wife and son return to London, Hans van den Broek stumbles upon the vibrant New York subculture of cricket, where he revisits his lost childhood and, thanks to a friendship with a charismatic and charming Trinidadian named Chuck Ramkissoon, begins to reconnect with his life and his adopted country. As the two men share their vastly different experiences of contemporary immigrant life in America, an unforgettable portrait emerges of an "other" New York populated by immigrants and strivers of every race and nationality.