Adam Mars-Jones

'We make lazy assumptions about the centre of things and its location. Who's to say that the centre of things isn't in a corner, way over there?''People in authority are always saying you should know your rights, though I've noticed they don't much enjoy it when you do.''Nobody can be a person twenty-fours hours a day - it just can't be done. At night the sets dissolve and the performance falls away. We're off the books.' That's John Cromer talking, in this fresh instalment of his lifelong saga. For John, embarking on a new stage of life in 1970s Cambridge, charm and wit aren't just assets, they are survival skills. It may be a case of John against the world. If so, don't be in too much of a hurry to bet on the world. Conjuring a remarkable voice and mind, Caret is a feast of a novel, served on a succession of small plates, each portion providing an adult's daily intake of literary nourishment. Reading it - like any encounter with John Cromer -- is guaranteed to help you work, rest and play.'Thank god for John Cromer and his creator Adam Mars-Jones, one of the funniest, most self-aware characters in English fiction, whose minute observations on everything from constipation to lust are a source of unexpected delight.' Linda Grant

'Joyous.' Observer'Tremendously entertaining.' Irish Times 'Truly original.' The Times** A Times and Guardian Book of the Year **'We make lazy assumptions about the centre of things and its location. Who's to say that the centre of things isn't in a corner, way over there?''Nobody can be a person twenty-fours hours a day - it just can't be done. At night the sets dissolve and the performance falls away. We're off the books.'That's John Cromer talking, in this fresh instalment of his lifelong saga. For John, embarking on a new stage of life in 1970s Cambridge, charm and wit aren't just assets, they are survival skills. It may be a case of John against the world. If so, don't be in too much of a hurry to bet on the world. Conjuring a remarkable voice and mind, Caret is a feast of a novel, served on a succession of small plates, each portion providing an adult's daily intake of literary nourishment. Reading it - like any encounter with John Cromer -- is guaranteed to help you work, rest and play.'Thank god for John Cromer and his creator Adam Mars-Jones, one of the funniest, most self-aware characters in English fiction, whose minute observations on everything from constipation to lust are a source of unexpected delight.' Linda Grant

Pristina, Kosovo, 1999. Barry Ashton, recently divorced, has been deployed as a civil engineer attached to the Royal Engineers corps in the British Army. In an extraordinary feat of ventriloquism, Adam Mars-Jones constructs a literary story with a thoroughly unliterary narrator, and a narrative that is anything but comic through the medium of a character who, essentially, is. Exploring masculinity, class and identity, Batlava Lake is a brilliant story of men and war by one of Britain's most accomplished writers.

In Box Hill, a vivid coming-of-age novel, a young man suddenly wakes up to his gay self--on his eighteenth birthday, when he receives the best gift ever: love and sex. In the woodsy cruising grounds of Box Hill, chubby Colin literally stumbles over glamorous Ray--ten years older, leather-clad, cool, handsome, a biker, and a top. (Colin, if largely unformed, is nevertheless decidedly a bottom.) Colin narrates his love--conveying how mind-blowing being with Ray is--in comically humble-pie terms. "If there are leaders then there must be followers, and I had followership skills in plenty just waiting to be tapped. To this day I can't see a fat kid in shorts without wanting to rush over and give him what comfort I can. To tell him it won't always be like this." Mars-Jones uses Colin's naivete to give a fresh view of the world and of love. Before long, however, homophobia, class, family strife, and loss rear their ugly heads. Yet in the end, it seems Colin's modest view oddly takes in the widest horizon: he learns that "people can care about anything." A surprise and a pleasure, Box Hill is an intensely moving short novel.

On the Sunday of his eighteenth birthday, in 1975, Colin takes a walk on Box Hill, a biker hang-out. There he accidentally trips over Ray, a biker napping under a tree – and that’s where it all starts. This transgressive, darkly affecting love story between men, winner of the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize, is a stunning novel of desire and domination by one of Britain’s most accomplished writers.

The film review can be a little art form, not just a consumer guide, as this collection shows. Covering more than 30 years of film releases, celebrated critic Adam Mars-Jones guides us through the most entertaining, most appalling, most fantastic films of his viewing lifetime, interleaving his original film reviews with new insights and reflections. Mars-Jones answers the questions that no other book has even bothered to ask. What is Twister really about? How many Steven Spielbergs are there? (Spoiler: he counts thirteen). How many of them are worth anything? Who had the greatest slow-burn career in the movies. (Clue: he taught Montgomery Clift how to roll a cigarette.) Which science-fiction film features the most haunting use of slime? Funny, combative and revealing, Second Sight is a celebration of the art form that maintains the strongest hold on the modern imagination.

'Brims with humour ... each sentence is a delight' IndependentShortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize 2016When his widowed father - once a high court judge and always a formidable figure - drifted into vagueness if not dementia, the writer Adam Mars-Jones took responsibility for his care. Intimately trapped in the London flat where the family had always lived, the two men entered an oblique new stage in their relationship. In the aftermath of an unlooked-for intimacy, Mars-Jones has written a book devoted to particular emotions and events. Kid Gloves is a highly entertaining book about (among other things) families, the legal profession, and the vexed question of Welsh identity. It is necessarily also a book about the writer himself - and the implausible, long-delayed moment, some years before, when he told his sexually conservative father about his own orientation, taking the homophobic bull by the horns. The supporting cast includes Ian Fleming, the Moors Murderers, Jacqueline Bisset and Gilbert O'Sullivan, the singer-songwriter whose trademark look kept long shorts from their rightful place on the fashion pages for so many years.

Cedilla continues the history of John Cromer ("adventures" sounds rather too hectic) begun by Pilcrow, described by the London Review of Books as " peculiar, original, utterly idiosyncratic" and by the Sunday Times as " truly exhilarating". These huge and sparkling books are particularly surprising coming from a writer of previously (let's be tactful) modest productivity, who had seemed stubbornly attached to small forms. John Cromer is the weakest hero in literature -- unless he's one of the strongest. In Cedilla he launches himself into the wider world of mainstream education, and comes upon deeper joys, subtler setbacks. The tone and texture of the two books is similar, but their emotional worlds are very different. The slow unfolding of themes is perhaps closer to Indian classical music than the Western tradition -- raga/saga, anyone? This isn't an epic novel as such things are normally understood, to be sure. It contains no physical battles and the bare minimum of travel, yet surely it qualifies. None of the reviews of Pilcrow explicitly compared it to a coral reef made of a billion tiny Crunchie bars, but that was the drift of opinion. Page by page, Cedilla too provides unfailing pleasure.

Noriko Smiling breathes new life into Ozu's film, and film studies as a whole. There has never been a film book like this.

'Gripping.' New Statesman 'Compulsive.' Observer 'Strange and exhilarating.' Sunday Times 'A joy to read.' Sunday Telegraph 'Constantly surprising.' London Review of Books 'One of the most original comic creations in recent fiction.' Guardian Time passed slowly in the 1950s, especially if you'd been put to bed and told not to move (until further notice). But John Cromer, the central character of this extraordinary novel, is much closer to being an explorer than a victim. He's the weakest hero in fiction - unless he's one of the strongest. The first instalment of the semi-infinite Pilcrow sequence, this novel of capacious wit and style marks the opening chapter of the most memorable and enjoyable experiment in modern fiction. 'Pilcrow is a humdinger, a startling work that stands out against the monotonous field of contemporary British fiction as a genuine, almost miraculous oddity.' Metro