Nigel Barley
Список книг автора Nigel BarleyHatewave
A man stands trial for a brutal murder, a crucial witness disappears, an MP's daughter confronts a dark family secret and an Asian assassin with a passion for Tom and Jerry cartoons inflicts hideous deaths on those who cannot answer his single question. Welcome to the world of Hatewave where the World Wide Web harnesses hate to bring death and destruction to its chosen targets.
Coronation Chicken
It is 1953 in southern England, the time of the Coronation, and Jack is a small boy from the poor end of the village who is trying desperately to understand the strange people he has been born into. After the gritty, state-regulated austerity of the war, it is supposed to be a time for the celebration of cherished values and national renewal and the idea is to share the ultimate luxury food – a chicken – at a street party as a symbol of all that is eternal in the British identity. But things do not go as planned and begin to fall apart in the face of death, sex and changing reality.<br><br>Coronation Chicken is a darkly comic novella that mixes personal recollection, anthropological insight and humour to give a portrait of a post-war Britain that has now vanished for ever. It is at once nostalgic and more than a little unnerving.
Even
Most people agree that the world should be just but that it simply isn't. Rogues flourish, the good die young and many feel they have not received their due. Unlike the rest of us, the anonymous hero of Even does not just complain about it, he embarks on a voyage of self-discovery, searching both for vengeance for the past and justice for the future in a personal attempt to bring balance to an unbalanced world. The result is a quest that ranges across contemporary London and is, by turn, humorous, heroic and horrific, involving Oedipus, fallen dictators and the iniquity of plumbers as it distils ancient wisdom into black humour.<br><br>Sharply written and observed, this extraordinary novella of revenge and misfortune offers a lively key to the contemporary world and the curious moralities of other cultures.
Requiescat
Between the two World Wars, the most famous employee of the British Museum was a cat called Mike. For some twenty years, Mike made it his home and his friend was a most irregular Egyptologist, Wallis Budge, a freebooting fieldworker and smuggler of antiquities. It was a time when the wildest spiritualist ideas were in full resurgence, when ghosts, mummies and lethal curses were held to stalk the earth and many leading scientists, writers and thinkers saw no contradiction between science and belief in the supernatural. And through such tempestuous times, Budge and Mike remained friends and allies as unearthly forces flickered all about them and the objects of the museum collection refused to be mere exhibits but pursued their own dark purposes across the years.