A Brief Guide To My Books

Villager is where I'd advise you to start if you wanted to read one of my novels. It's also the one people most frequently tell me they reread. It's set on a fictional moor which just happens to be in the exact place Dartmoor is in the real world (I'd written so much about the history and folklore of the real moor in my non-fiction I thought it would be a more interesting challenge to invent my own here, and it was) and covers almost two centuries of life in and around one village, connected by a lost record and a ghostly legend or two. It was my attempt to write a story that's psychedelic in the same way some of my favourite records are psychedelic. Comments I've had about it include "It did my fucking head in, in that best possible way." EXTRACT HERE.

21st-Century Yokel (EXTRACT HERE) is not a bad place to start with my non-fiction. It's a combination of memoir, social history, humour, wildlife and at least six or seven other things. I think Ring The Hill (EXTRACT HERE), the non-fiction book that came after it, is a bit better, but Yokel is arguably more anarchic and possibly has a few more laughs. You'd probably like both if you like walking, rivers, hills, scarecrows or the sea and don't hate animals.

1983 is my second and most autobiographical novel. It's not the book you'll probably think it is after reading the first couple of chapters. It's a little less dense and more daft than Villager but has a similarly polyphonic nature, with a multi-voiced narrative telling the story of one year in a Nottinghamshire mining village not dissimilar to the one I spent the first decade of my life in. I loved living inside it and missed it terribly when I finished it. Someone called it "Stranger Things rewritten by Kurt Vonnegut and Sue Townsend" but I don't know if that's true. It's probably more "me rewritten by me". It was arguably the biggest casualty of the demise of Unbound, since the hardback came out just as the shit was hitting the fan, but I feel marginally confident that it will finally find its true audience 60-70 years after I am dead. EXTRACT HERE.

Help The Witch is a wintry collection of short stories I wrote in a snowy high-up place as 2017 turned into 2018. It won a Shirley Jackson Horror Writing Award, which always amuses me a bit, since I'm far too much of a wuss to do any actual horror writing. I'd call it more "unsettling and spooky" than "scary" and some of the blurbs you'll see about it online, referencing MR James, are probably a bit misleading, since they were written by my ex-publishers before the book was written and they realised I'm nowhere near that serious and had spent the previous autumn reading Grace Paley and Ian Frazier. It was kind of an experiment where I asked myself, "Can the atmosphere of the building you're writing a book in leak into the book itself?" The answer: yes. EXTRACT HERE.

Everything Will Swallow You (signed copies via that link if you are quick enough) is my most recent novel, and - I believe - my best. It was certainly the one I found most exhausting and rewarding to write. All the mountains I made for myself during its creation ended up being what rewarded me most but also what makes it really really hard to summarise. To put it briefly it's about an antique dealer who lives with a semi-aquatic creature who many people mistake for a dog but is in the deeper sense extremely undoglike and doesn't even get on with dogs. It's also about Dorset, Cornwall, the differences between the 20th-Century and the 21st, the power of old objects, and how we turn facts into folklore (and how future generations might do the same). You can read extracts of it here and here.

These books - which are now reavailable, and which, after a tough couple of years, I will now once again earn money from - were all written between 2016 and now, the period after I stopped trying to shape myself into what I thought publishers wanted and started to do my own thing. Immediately prior to that I wrote two "cats and more" memoirs which I'm still very proud of, and have a not dissimilar voice and feel to the one found in my more recent non-fiction. In some ways, they're just books about the loud, excitable behaviour of my dad, disguised as books about animals. The Good, The Bad And The Furry came out in October 2013 and went straight into the top ten Sunday Times Bestseller Chart. Close Encounters Of The Furred Kind came out two years later, and didn't sell quite as well. Which is baffling to me, since it's without question a marginally better book.

Prior to those two, I wrote two other "cats and more" books which definitely have their moments and definitely are about the life I lived but feel more obedient, more fearful, less free: Under The Paw (currently out of print) and Talk To The Tail. I also wrote a couple of books about golf, from the perspective of a frequently bemused, fundamentally ungolf sort of person who just happened to like hitting balls with a club: Nice Jumper, when I was about three and hadn't learned to write yet but had a lot of enthusiasm, and the slightly better Bring Me The Head Of Sergio Garcia, from when I was a few years older. In between those I wrote two music books I'm not going to even name here because they're mostly shit and can most positively be looked at as "part of the learning process".

I have recently finished a new collection of short stories. And I'm getting excited about telling you about that, but will leave it for another day in the very near future.

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