Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton
G. K. Chesterton wrote of Orthodoxy that it represented an attempt ‘to state the philosophy in which I have come to believe’ and to do so ‘in a vague and personal way, in a set of mental pictures rather than in a series of deductions’. For most of its readers, it is the wittiest and most rollicking defence of the Christian faith ever written. With an introduction by Jon Elsby.
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Early Novels and Short Fiction (hbk), by Peter Cowlam
Early Novels and Short Fiction (hardback version) is the first of three volumes covering Peter Cowlam’s adventures into fiction, from the mid-1970s to the early years of the twenty-first century.
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Early Novels and Short Fiction (pbk), by Peter Cowlam
Early Novels and Short Fiction (paperback version) is the first of three volumes covering Peter Cowlam’s adventures into fiction, from the mid-1970s to the early years of the twenty-first century.
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Ghosts in the Machine (hbk), by Peter Cowlam
A collection of finely crafted short-form poems, marked out for their candour and observational precision. The book is published in hardback as a CentreHouse Press parallel text, with Angela D’Ambra’s translations into Italian alongside the original poems in English.
‘Peter Cowlam’s bi-lingual English-Italian collection of poetry, Ghosts in the Machine | Spettri nel meccanismo, is a finely wrought act of introspective minimalism. Structured predominantly as short-lined couplets, they range from imagistic meditations to intellectual and physical explorations.' Sudeep Sen, Tagore prize-winner.
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Laurel, by Peter Cowlam
A sequence of poems whose terrain is love, loss and lovers' rivalries.
His poems have an epic feel , painting vivid pictures with the fewest words possible. This new collection gathers together threads of irony, self-deprecating nostalgia, and linguistic playfulness in one powerful skein of sharp, imagistic one-liners.
Jane Holland, author of Disreputable
His spare poems brilliantly unfold an inner landscape on a complex journey of the heart that feels both personal and universal. Rachel Blum, author of The Doctor of Flowers
I am reminded of T. E. Hulme's imagist poems I discovered as a teenager through Herbert Read's The True Voice of Feeling. Laurel is a distillation of mood, atmosphere, feeling, expressed in a direct and surprising way, with the infinite, sky, sea, moon, sun, brought close to us and homely. Garry OConnor, author of The Vagabond Lover
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Manifesto, by Peter Cowlam
Manifesto is a sequence of haikuesque poems, aimed as a counter-blast at the political and financial institutions complicit in our master-slave society, wage slaves exhorted to fund a debt economy, and by that heavy price remain obedient citizens. As a narrative it charts, in its own fragmented way, a programme of resistance drawn up by a group of cyberspace guerrillas, whose agenda is the reversal of institutional propaganda put out as a daily drip-feed by press and other media.
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Marisa, by Peter Cowlam
The 1970s. Bruce takes over a financial consultancy firm founded by his father, while student Marisa inherits property. Love, lust and money drive them both, until their relationship begins to fall apart. Bruce's commitment is to the world of commerce. Marisa sets off in quest of social and political justice. Twenty-five years after an intense and bad-tempered affair, a chance entry in one of Bruce's business listings shows that Marisa is now boss of the Rae Agency a media PR concern. Bruce, as he recollects their partnership, is torn between his staid if harmonious family life, and renewing contact with Marisa. Finally, he commits to a course of action, but must face the truth of not having grasped the widening cultural and social separation their two different views of the world have wrought over the intervening quarter century.
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New King Palmers, by Peter Cowlam
Set in the late 1990s, in the months up to and after the death of Princess Diana, New King Palmers is narrated by its principal character Humfrey Joel, a close friend of Earl Eliot d'Oc. The earl's ancestry is bound up with the Habsburgs and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. D'Oc is a member of the British Privy Council and a close friend of Prince Charles (now King) and Princess Diana. In the months preceding Diana's death, he commissions a young theatre professional to develop a play. The play's theme is constitutional issues surrounding Prince Charles, with the heir's interests served by UK withdrawal from the EU, before it becomes a federal superstate. The commissioned play is called New King Palmers, and d'Oc maintains rigorous editorial control over it. When d'Oc's death shortly follows Diana's, Joel is named as d'Oc's literary executor, with the task of bringing the play to the English stage. Supposedly written into the text is an encoded message from the British Privy Council on behalf of the House of Windsor, addressed to the stewards of the EU. When news of this leaks out no one in the British literary and theatrical worlds believes it. In fact most come to see Earl d'Oc as an invented character behind which Joel shields himself, when his own motives are themselves sinister. So sinister, an MI5 spook is put on the case.New King Palmers won the 2018 Quagga Prize for Literary Fiction.
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Opus Thirty Three Bagatelles, by Peter Cowlam
Opus Thirty Three Bagatelles is a collection of finely crafted haikuesque poems, marked out for their candour and observational precision.
I am reminded of T. E. Hulme's imagist poems I discovered as a teenager through Herbert Read's The True Voice of Feeling. These poems are a distillation of mood, atmosphere, feeling, expressed in a direct and surprising way. Garry OConnor, author of Ian McKellen: The Biography
I relish these sharply observed, finely concentrated moments of insight and wit. Catherine Belsey, author of Critical Practice
Poems sharp in definition, concise, deceptively simple and allusive. Eliza Granville, author of Gretel and the Dark
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Utopia, by Peter Cowlam
Utopia follows the fortunes of Zora Murillo, who escapes the clutches of a military junta, and landing in a small English market town buys and renovates the Pleiades, a rundown hotel. The Pleiades is soon transformed into a living cabaret act and hotbed of political activism. Soon the locals want to know the source of Zora's unfathomable wealth, yet only one of them knows her back story, which is of espionage, the sinister deployment of AI and robotics, and a life-and-death political struggle for her and her father.
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