How the British government packaged and sold its people to the world. In a little over a generation the bones and sinews of the British economy – rail, energy, water, postal services, municipal housing – have been sold to remote, unaccountable private owners. In a series of brilliant portraits James Meek shows how Britain’s common wealth became private, and the impact it has had on us all. In a series of panoramic accounts, Meek explores the human stories behind the incremental privatization of the nation over the last three decades. As our national assets are being sold, the new buyers reap the rewards, and the ordinary consumer is left to pay the ever rising bill. Urgent, powerfully written and deeply moving, Private Island is a passionate anatomy of the state of the nation for readers of Chavs and Whoops!.
The Museum of Doubt is a new collection of surreal and unnerving short stories from award-winning writer James Meek. The array of characters who populate Meek's vague and elusive worlds are driven by paranoia and doubts, as well as hopes and fears of things only half-glimpsed.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION LONGLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE TIMES, GUARDIAN, SUNDAY TIMES, DAILY EXPRESS, SCOTSMAN and SPECTATOR
Three journeys. One road.
England, 1348. A gentlewoman flees an odious arranged marriage, a Scots proctor sets out for Avignon and a young ploughman in search of freedom is on his way to volunteer with a company of archers. All come together on the road to Calais.
Coming in their direction from across the Channel is the Black Death, the plague that will wipe out half of the population of Northern Europe. As the journey unfolds, overshadowed by the archers’ past misdeeds and clerical warnings of the imminent end of the world, the wayfarers must confront the nature of their loves and desires.
A tremendous feat of language and empathy, it summons a medieval world that is at once uncannily plausible, utterly alien and eerily reflective of our own. James Meek’s extraordinary To Calais, In Ordinary Time is a novel about love, class, faith, loss, gender and desire – set against one of the biggest cataclysms of human history.