James Hawes

Agripping social, cultural and political history of how Britain and Germany, two nations with such close ties, ended up fighting World War One

Kafka's features, and that dreaded word, Kafkaesque, are known to millions who have never read serious literature. Generations of academics and critics have maintained the image of Franz Kafka as a tortured seer whose works defy interpretation. In Excavating Kafka James Hawes reveals the truth that lies beneath the image of a middle-European Nostradamus with a typographically irresistible name. The real Franz Kafka was no angst-ridden paranoid but a well-groomed young man-about-town who frequented brothels, had regular sex with a penniless-but-pretty girl and subscribed to upmarket pornography (published by the very man who published Kafka's first stories). Excavating Kafka debunks a number of key facets of the Kafka-Myth, including the idea that Kafka was the archetypal genius neglected in his lifetime; that he was stuck in a dead-end job and struggling to find time to write; that he was tormented by fear of sex; that he had a uniquely terrible, domineering father who had no understanding of his son's needs; that his literature is mysterious and opaque; that he constructs fantasy-worlds in which innocent everymen live in fear of mysterious and totalitarian powers-that-be. Written with the panache of a supremely gifted comic writer, Excavating Kafka is an engaging and involving reassessment of a major figure of literary modernism that will be welcomed and enjoyed by students of Kafka and by general readers alike.

John Goode is a leftie lecturer who just wants to give his beloved wife and kids a normal life. You know: north London, good schools, nice neighbours, sash windows... yes, you know. But who can afford that kind of normal these days? Goode can only daydream of becoming a television academic, or else of a bloody great economic crash that would make his job worth something again. So when he stumbles on a long-buried assault rifle whilst planting plum-trees for his children, he soon begins to wonder if this might be just the tool to seriously renegociate his family's future...

Brian Marley, a divorced Englishman, is alone in the vilest jungle on earth, about to die live on television. When Brian contacts the outside world, the Headmaster is outraged to find an embattled New Labour MP unchallenged by a hapless Tory Party.

James Hawes' fourth novel takes his not-quite-innocent heroine, Jane Feverfew, on a comic journey from the eccentrities of Wales into the unholy Soho movie world.

Harry MacDonald had seen plenty of skulls - arsing about with some poor sod or other's skull is what pays Harry's rent - but until the day of his official thirty-ninth birthday (actually, Harry was knocking on forty), which was also the day he met Shnade again, he had never noticed the shape of his own skull-to-be;