Set against the backdrop of World War II, the story follows Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Earl Grady as he navigates a tense atmosphere of espionage and suspicion. Tasked with alerting local law enforcement about potential threats from Japanese residents, Grady's world spirals into chaos when a committee member is murdered shortly before the Pearl Harbor attack. The discovery of the body, gruesomely impaled by a samurai sword, leads the FBI to suspect Japanese spies, raising questions about loyalty and prejudice during a time of war.
Lucas Cage can now lay claim to the only part of his father's enormous legacy that he ever craved - The Works, the disused old printing house hard by the Thames. Lucas invites special people to share it with him: 'the family', as he comes to call them. 'Connolly is a funny man . . . He creates a sense of intimacy and collusion with his reader that is rare in contemporary fiction.' Financial Times 'The Works shows off Joseph Connolly's verbal glee, his relentless enjoyment of voices at full tilt. And in the monstrously loveable building, he offers readers a special treat.' Independent 'Connolly manages to suggest an overarching allegory of almost Beckettian largeness and openness . . . Entertaining, but emotionally and intellectually involving too, Connolly's memorable novel is a story of the light that failed.' Daily Telegraph
All those things of last summer have changed everyone - heartbreaks, jealousies and various alarming pressures. For John Powers it means squaring up to the reality of losing his beautiful wife Lulu, simply because of his pathological and totally unfounded sexual paranoia and subsequent homicidal delusions. Brian and Dotty Morgan, uncomfortably squatting in a caravan in well-to-do ex-neighbours Howard and Elizabeth Street's driveway, are learning how to live with not having it all, none of it in fact - although that doesn't stop Dotty conspiring to secure for herself Dawn, uncared-for baby of Melody. Meanwhile their fifteen-year-old son Colin has fallen in love with the fabulous Carol, but her unforgiving brother Terry would preferto see Colin dead. Winter is also being unkind to Norman Furnish who lost his job working for Howard and with it Howard's beloved daughter Katie, who herself is hitched up with a neanderthal gun-toting romancer from Chicago, Rick, as well as Melody's former squeeze Miles McInerney, an amoral, cocky salesman. And what of Howard and Elizabeth - can his new love Laa-Laa and her current fling Zoo-Zoo (Howard's ex - don't ask) help them find peace, contentment and sexual nirvana this Christmas? Winter Breaks is a seriously funny sequel to Connolly's best-selling Summer Things.
The formidable fox-hunting obsessed Lady Bobbin has put together a Christmas house party at Compton Bobbin, including her rebellious daughter Philadelphia, the girl's pompous suitor, a couple of children obsessed with newspaper death notices, and an aspiring writer whose deadly (in more ways than one) serious first novel has been acclaimed as the funniest book of the year, to his utter dismay. And then there is beautiful ex courtesan Amabelle Fortescue and her group of guests staying in a nearby cottage ... As the house parties starts to unravel, so the jokes increase- this is Nancy Mitford's second novel and one of her earliest forays into the world of the Bright Young Things.
The repetitions and ruminations of a multitude of inner voices, the comic set pieces and the horrified hyperreal prose are as spot-on as ever.' Guardian '[An] immaculately plotted comedy of manners ... this is the sort of book it is quite impossible to put down once you have opened it.' The Times
A satire of modern life, by the author of Poor Souls, This Is It and Stuff. Elizabeth has her heart on a traditional English seaside holiday, and Howard, her well-to-do estate-agent husband, agrees to pay. But Howard wants to stay in London with the object of his lust, Zoo-Zoo.
