<div>Eighteen tales featuring down-on-their-luck characters whose dreams will never come true, by Man Booker Prize&ndash;long-listed author D. J. Taylor In the vein of Raymond Carver&rsquo;s short prose, these eighteen stories sharply capture ordinary people desperate to escape their dead-end lives as they grapple with failure, disappointment, and missed chances. In &ldquo;Dreams of Leaving,&rdquo; Harlem pornographer Fuchs has seen it all; though he has never traveled farther west than Cincinnati, his bedroom is a shrine to all the places he secretly fantasizes about. &ldquo;The Summer People&rdquo; are the tourists who come to Cromer and invade Julian&rsquo;s life every July and August, but this sweltering season of change will mark a turning point in the Norfolk teen&rsquo;s life. In &ldquo;Flights,&rdquo; a mid-level insurance salesman named Dorfman haunts airports and collects model airplane kits&mdash;only to find his humdrum life changed forever by a beautiful Filipino flight attendant. &ldquo;The Survivor&rdquo; is about an unsung writer who lives through many millennia, from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age to the present&mdash;as well as an unimaginable world without books. And in the title story, twenty-four-year-old deli worker Susy fantasizes about an end-of-summer vacation away from Tara City, Wyoming&mdash;&ldquo;a place you moved out of.&rdquo; Football, a Montana rock band, and a running man populate other tales in this superlative anthology that showcases Taylor&rsquo;s mastery of his craft. </div>

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After Bathing at Baxters

<div>A rich and evocative portrait of one of the greatest authors of Victorian England Who was William Makepeace Thackeray? Was he the wealthy dilettante who came to London in the 1830s and squandered his fortune on newspapers? Was he the impoverished freelance author of the 1840s who scrapped for every penny he could get? Or was he the great writer who published Vanity Fair in 1847, skewering Victorian society and ensuring his literary legacy? Throughout the many phases of his life, Thackeray remained an enigma. He was friendly but standoffish, generous yet miserly, confident and utterly terrified of failure. A century and a half after Thackeray&rsquo;s death, D. J. Taylor has produced a biography that tackles the complexities of these contradictions and restores Thackeray to his place in the literary pantheon. His fortune lost by the time he was thirty, his personal life in constant torment, Thackeray&rsquo;s story is as dramatic as that of any of his characters. In Thackeray, the man can finally be seen in full. </div>

Overdrive

Thackeray

<div>A thirty-something, would-be master of the universe tries to reinvent himself in London in this hip and hilarious novel about ambition, family, missed connections, and Anglo-American relations It is the late nineties. The Iraqis are in Kuwait and the former decade&rsquo;s financial bubble has burst. From his high-backed swivel chair in an eight-foot cubicle on the sixth floor of a London management-consulting firm, Scott Marshall prays he can survive the coming carnage. The son of an inveterate Anglophile, Marshall moved to England when his former employer&mdash;Manhattan&rsquo;s Hassenblad Consultancy&mdash;went belly-up. With the optimistic wine- and money-flowing days of Reaganomics vanished into a sinkhole of blighted hope and stalled aspirations, Scott is desperate to hold on to his job amid massive layoffs. He is meanwhile dealing with a girlfriend hiding a nasty secret; an embattled football club that conceals a wellspring of deceit and subterfuge; and the reappearance of his father, whose ill-timed visit unleashes a swarm of ghosts from the past. From Wall Street to Belgravia, English Settlement is a novel about manners, money, morals, and national identity on both sides of the Atlantic. </div>

English Settlement

<div>A screenwriter is about to discover that in life there are no rewrites Martin Benson writes scripts for porn films. He didn&rsquo;t always aspire to be a screenwriter; he once had dreams of becoming a great journalist. But life has a way of interfering with the best-laid plans. In this darkly captivating novel, Martin shares the story of his past&mdash; and a future that is yet to be written. Martin&rsquo;s search for that elusive thing called happiness takes him back to the Norfolk village of his youth. There, he meets and moves in with schoolteacher Suzi Richards, whose biological clock is ticking. But he is haunted by Elaine Keenan, the gorgeous actress who got away. Then one day the phone rings, sending Martin on a search for his lost love and a final reckoning with the past. Filled with angst and longing, Real Life charts one man&rsquo;s course back through his own history&mdash;a witty, lively account that blurs the line between art and reality, with an ending you will never see coming.</div>

Real Life

<div>A wanderer struggles to understand his uncle&rsquo;s downfall six years after a financial catastrophe George Chell has never met a man as witty, as charming, or as brilliant as his uncle. Edward Chell was a financial titan, ruling over a kingdom of profit with an emperor&rsquo;s savage grace&mdash;until a stock market crash revealed that everything he had was built on sand. It destroyed both empire and emperor in one fell swoop, and nephew George was cast out into the world in the aftermath. For six years, he has wandered Britain, staying in grubby hotels and trying as hard as he can to forget his uncle. But when an article in the Financial Times reminds him of all he has lost, George has no choice but to confront the past in an attempt to understand the disaster that upended his life. Raised in the provincial backwater of a Norwich council flat, George was dazzled by the bright lights of the London financial world&mdash;but to save himself, he will have to look at that world with new eyes. </div>

Trespass

<div>Winner of the Whitbread Biography Award: A &ldquo;profoundly moving [and] definitive&rdquo; portrait of George Orwell, author of 1984 and larger-than-life literary genius (The Daily Telegraph). It was not easy to bury George Orwell. After a lifetime of iconoclasm, during which he professed no interest in religion and no affiliation with any church, he asked to be buried in an Anglican churchyard&mdash;but none would have him. Orwell&rsquo;s friends fought for him to have a proper grave, however, and the author of 1984, Animal Farm, and Homage to Catalonia, among other brilliant works of prose, poetry, and journalism, was laid to rest in a quiet country cemetery. Almost immediately, his legacy was in dispute. Orwell did not want any biographies written of him, but that has not stopped scholars from trying. Of all those published since the author&rsquo;s death in 1950, D. J. Taylor&rsquo;s prize-winning book is considered the most definitive. Born in India, Orwell spent his forty-six years of life traveling the British Empire and confronting the world head on. From the trenches of Spain to the top of bestseller lists, Taylor presents Orwell fully&mdash;as a writer, social critic, and human being. </div>

Orwell

<div>Past and present collide for a man on a mission to document a history that may or may not exist, in this ingenious novel by the acclaimed author of Derby Day Dr. Feelgood&rsquo;s is a brothel overrun with fat, overindulged mice that lies at the western tip of a remote village somewhere in the Far East. It&rsquo;s presided over by Mr. Mouzookseem, an illiterate Englishman with his own reasons for fleeing the family fold for a life of anonymity. This is the beginning&mdash;or is it the end?&mdash;of a story that weaves in and out of time as David Castell immortalizes Mouzookseem and others in his notebook. A pragmatist whose father had his own ideas about what history can teach, David is a traveler of the mind and heart. Although he has been to exotic places, from Kashmir to the Russian steppe, he finds the domestic train from Paddington to Oxford hopelessly confounding&mdash;and the subject of an existential conversation. His musings unfold into a vivid tapestry of his own past, from his life as a student at Oxford to the women he loved and lusted after. As the stories and observations in David&rsquo;s notebooks take shape, they become an allegory for life, death, and the distortions of memory.</div>

Great Eastern Land

<div>An entertainer looks back on his life in this novel based on the rise and fall of a famous British comedy team From the vantage point of late middle age, Edward &ldquo;Ted&rdquo; King&mdash;one half of the dynamic duo Upward &amp; King&mdash;discovers that nostalgia isn&rsquo;t what it used to be. Ted met Arthur Upward in Britain&rsquo;s National Service. They started out doing gigs at Soho cabarets, and in the mid-sixties, they took their act on the road. By the late seventies, they were the most beloved comedians on British television, watched by ten million viewers per week. This inventive novel, narrated by Ted on the eve of the release of a documentary about their famous partnership, begins with his boyhood in the farm fields of post-war Yarmouth. The son of a shopkeeper with few aspirations, Ted soon realizes he wants to tell jokes for a living. Then, one day in a hall at the sergeants&rsquo; mess, he sees Arthur perform the &ldquo;Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.&rdquo; He instantly senses the titanic influence the other man will have on his life. Ted plays the straight man to Arthur&rsquo;s pratfalling comic, and they go on to captivate a nation. Until it all goes wrong. Crosscutting between the past and present, The Comedy Man is a poignant, funny &ldquo;memoir&rdquo; that reminds us how comedy is often derived from the most serious situations&mdash;and from the inexpressible longings of the human heart. </div>

D. J. Taylor
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Books By D. J. Taylor (8 Books)

After Bathing at Baxters

Thackeray

English Settlement

Real Life

Trespass

Orwell

Great Eastern Land

The Comedy Man

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D. J. TaylorFollow this author