CentreHouse Press is an independent publisher, specialising in memoirs, travel books, plays, literary fiction, children’s books and non-fiction. The press also publishes audiobooks and ebooks. We have published, in either paper or electronic form, the following writers: Garry O’Connor, G. K. Chesterton, Peter Cowlam, Tony Phillips, Andrew Elsby, Jon Elsby, Eliza Granville, Harry Greenberg, and Sam Richards. The press has also featured the work of artists Anne Boulting and Julie Oxenforth, and has worked with artists Thierry Naiglin, Dawn Hunter and Elena Rosillo.

 

 

Andrew Elsby

 

Britain and the World Britain and the World: Case Studies in British Foreign Policy Decision-Making 1939–1968 traces a period of relative British decline in economic, military, political and diplomatic power and the policies with which successive British governments reacted to it. The book assesses the different causal influences on the decision-making process, including the objective economic, political and military context and the attitudes, perceptions, personalities and relationships of those involved in British political and official establishment foreign-policy decision-making. Addressed are the negotiations for an Anglo-Soviet alliance in the spring and summer of 1939, the Soviet demand in late 1941 and early 1942 for recognition of their annexation of the Baltics, the post-war future of Germany, the Berlin crisis of 1948–49, the Suez crisis of 1956, and a comparison between British policy over the Korean War between 1950 and 1953, and British policy in the Vietnam War between 1964 and 1968. Available for purchase in paperback here.

 

Complicity in the Third Reich Complicity in the Third Reich is a trilogy, whose component books are: Ordinary Germans; Eichmann: Explaining Perpetrator Behaviour; and Post-War Justice For Nazi War Criminals: Context, Culpability and Legitimacy. Together the three books examine multiple levels of German complicity in the objectives and activities of the Nazi regime. The whole is an attempt to establish the nature and extent of complicity of ordinary Germans in their differing roles, and to show a parallel between their behaviour in the Third Reich and human behaviour in all cultures, societies and historical periods. The argument presented is that the decisive factor in the behaviour of both ordinary Germans and Nazi perpetrators is pursuit of personal interest. It is further posited that the optimisation of personal outcomes is the decisive causal influence on all human behaviour, regardless of culture, society and epoch. Available for purchase in hardback here.

 

The Burghers of Ceylon The Burghers of Ceylon traces the origins and history of the mixed-race populations of imperial Ceylon. It explains how, and why, those populations emerged, how they developed, how they were distinguished – and how they distinguished themselves – from the Europeans and from the native populations. It explores the components of burgher identity. The author also provides answers to the following questions. How reliable is the evidence of the Dutch Burgher Union’s genealogies? How prevalent is racial misrepresentation, and what were the motives behind it? How were the mixed-race populations treated by the European colonial powers? What happened to those mixed-race populations when colonial rule ended in 1948?

 

The author’s interest in the burghers of Ceylon came about after his mother’s death, when he discovered she was from a Dutch burgher family in Ceylon. Her mother was half English and half native, and her father, Raoul Frank, was a Dutch burgher descended from a long line of German, French, Dutch, Belgian and British European male ancestors, with native or mixed-race female ancestors from the Dutch and British periods in Ceylon. Available for purchase in paperback here.

 

Chamberlain and Appeasement Neville Chamberlain was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from May 1937 to May 1940, and is identified with the policy of ‘appeasement’ towards Adolf Hitler’s Germany in the period preceding World War II. In this new study Dr Andrew Elsby assesses the different explanations of appeasement, taking into account evidence as to its causes. He rejects the revisionist case, and develops a counter-revisionism, establishing a more comprehensive assessment of the causes of British foreign policy during the period, using minutes of Foreign Policy Committee and Cabinet meetings, Chamberlain’s personal papers, and in addition literature on the theory of foreign-policy decision-making apropos of the British political system. Stress is laid on the effect of attitudinal and motivational factors and individual influence, not least that of the Prime Minister himself. Conclusions reached by this new study are timely, and are of relevance now, vis-à-vis the UK and its relationship with Europe. Available for purchase in paperback here.

 

 

Eliza Granville

 

The Curious Ones For more than fifteen years, Isabelle has been tormented by guilt over the disappearance of her youngest daughter.  If only she’d been at the school gate to meet her. If only she hadn’t been so engrossed in her painting. If only….

But now there’s a granddaughter. In the hope that this new baby may heal what time, drugs and doctors never could, Isabelle drives the length of France to meet her. On the way she stops in a quiet patch of woodland and comes across a small child who looks like, but surely can’t be, her lost daughter. The girl vanishes. Perhaps. And Isabelle gradually becomes convinced that unknown forces are at work, in which case her granddaughter may also be in danger.   

 

Once Upon a Time in Paris Like previous last novel, Gretel and the Dark, Once Upon a Time in Paris cleverly combines a fairy-tale element with magic realism: in this case, an account of events in the life of Charles Perrault. Set in Paris in 1695, intertwining historical fact with multiple layers of fiction, Once Upon a Time in Paris invites readers to consider the possibility that the Tales of Mother Goose were not written by Charles Perrault (nor by his son, Pierre Darmancourt, as originally claimed), but by a reclusive figure almost entirely overlooked by history. The novel is set at that point where the tradition of oral story-telling is fast being absorbed by the written tale, and our mysterious recluse is caught between the two practices. Once Upon a Time in Paris offers a dazzling new insight into the connection between the ogre of folklore and fairy-tale and the post-Enlightenment feminist struggle.

 

‘Twists, turns, knots and kinks…’ No shortage of those in this deliciously smart, mischievous and engrossing novel. Not a goose feather in sight – like Perrault’s own fairy tales, Granville’s novel has been written with a swan’s quill. I read it in a sitting.’ Professor Richard Marggraf Turley

 

‘Real world and fairy-tale blend and interpenetrate until the boundaries between fantasy and reality blur and meld. The relations between fact and fiction, actual and imaginary realities, are continually brought into question in this subtle and always engaging narrative.’ Jon Elsby

 

 

Garry O’Connor

 

The Terrorist The late 1960s. Celebrity playwright Oliver Lindall has assembled his team of players for the premiere of his new play When Winter Comes. For the author, first-night nerves won’t be his only obstacle. Among his troupe is Simon Baird, chosen for his acting skills, yet known for his reputation. Baird has brooding class resentments and is as likely to wreak destruction as shine in any new production. When the play finally premieres, we still don’t know what it will be: more plaudits for Oliver Lindall, or chaos at the hands of the hugely talented, mercurial Simon Baird? In the climax of O’Connor’s The Terrorist we are delivered not only a verdict, but one further question: who actually owns the finished production – the playwright, the players, or the audience played to? Simon Baird has his answer, and demonstrates it graphically. Available for purchase in paperback here.

 

The Vagabond Lover Cavan O’Connor was born into near destitution in Nottingham in 1899, but quickly rose to become the legendary ‘Vagabond of Song’. He was one of the most famous singing legends of his era. He topped Variety bills. He was an adventurer, who cut a swashbuckling figure. In the golden age of radio, his broadcasts reached listening figures of over thirteen million. With his flawless tenor voice his status was as latter-day troubadour, a star of stage imitated by romantics young and old all over the civilised world. But what lay behind the idealised celebrity? Was he a gift from God, or a flawed, vulnerable being like the rest of us? Enter the writer son Garry O’Connor, who answers that question emphatically. In his memoir The Vagabond Lover, the father-son dispute unveils without sentimentality the general mess of domestic and family life, of which Cavan was the head. Revealed – in this searing, honest, dark revelation – are the miserable depths the sweet singer of lyrical song plumbed, and remorselessly so. O’Connor fils does not spare the reader, refusing to gloss over the traumas and crises of family conflict, as they run in parallel to his own fortunes and vicissitudes. He is dispassionate with the biographical detail, yet impassioned enough to recall one of his own plays, penned in his Cambridge youth, where the father Cavan is reimagined. In fiction as in life he is cast as the pivotal character in a family drama painful in its climaxes. Overarching is a first ever account of those Cambridge years, peopled with familiar icons of twenty-first-century culture. It’s a fast-moving, two-pronged probe into the nature of celebrity, arriving at a profound resolution as the author shrugs off the flaws and setbacks packaged as part of the celebrity deal.

 

‘A racy, opinionated and very readable account of life and loves in the English theatre since the 1960s.’ Bamber Gascoigne

 

‘A real page-turner. I couldn’t put this one down.’ John Tydeman

 

‘An enthralling family biography, full of gossip, wise insights and fascinating revelations.’ Sir Ian McKellen

 

‘A delightful journey – probably O’Connor’s best.’ Sir Derek Jacobi

 

The Butcher of Poland (a play) Condemned to death and hanged in 1947, Hans Frank’s public repentance was unique among the leading Nazi criminals tried at Nuremberg. One psychiatrist pointed out Frank’s ‘beatific tranquillity merely hid his own tensions’. But what of such carefully acted out piety? Didn’t this hastily cultivated yet forceful and theatrical piety have something about it which was so patently flimsy compared to the much more formidable integrity and long studied piety of Pope Pius XII?

 

Both had their roots in South German and Italian theatricality. In the way Frank called attention to himself on every possible occasion he was no ordinary criminal. He was not only criminal in his acts and attitudes, which he acknowledged, but also he flaunted, in an egotistic, nihilistic way, a vanity of evils which today remain a significant part of our culture. Unlike Ribbentrop, who lamented he would never be able to write his ‘beautiful memoirs’, Frank wasted no time during the trial and had gone ahead. He composed his testament, Facing the Gallows, with a dedication from Goethe’s Werther, in quoting from which he subtly changed the wording to serve his self-serving account of ‘former and partial guilt’ – to make it sound as if God endorsed it, which was not in the sense of the original. Available from Amazon Kindle USA, Amazon Kindle UK, and a choice of other ebook retailers here.

 

Debussy Was My Grandfather | The Madness of Vivien Leigh (two plays) A theme common to both these plays is the emotional and psychological turmoil underneath the veil of public careers, with an uncompromising look at the undercurrents: the dysfunction of domestic/family life, in all its anguish and floridity. There’s a nicely judged balance between art in its moments of transcendence, and the reality underpinning it, with a flawed humanity put to its service. It’s a theme O’Connor has explored in a substantial body of work as novelist, biographer and playwright. Available for purchase in paperback here.

 

‘With real insight O’Connor gets plausibly close to what made Olivier and wife tick as artists…a penetrating, utterly objective mind at work.’ Irish Times

 

‘Compulsive…the pair who were Charles and Di, Torville and Dean, Tragedy and Comedy, Scylla and Charybdis all rolled into one.’ Vogue

 

‘The mythology of one of the century’s most celebrated marriages…a brilliantly perceptive portrait.’ The Observer

 

Naked Woman Under the one title Naked Woman are brought together two plays by the critically acclaimed Garry O’Connor. The first, Semmelweis, is a victim play in the Tennessee Williams tradition, and the second, De Raptu Meo, is a theatrical re-creation of English poet Geoffrey Chaucer and his times. Semmelweis is from the start in a trap set by his own character and his overriding passion for truth. But his is a story of crushing disappointment, having parallels today, especially in medicine. To see flaws in the system, and to speak out against cover-ups and vested interest, invites pariah status and a ruthless sweeping aside in the relentless drive for conformity and profit.

 

De Raptu Meo, as Libby Purves pointed out in her review, exposes the relativity of truth we find in contemporary culture, which she has contrasted with events surrounding English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, who faced, in Richard II’s reign, the accusation of rape. Present society is awash with stories of sexual abuse as no other age has been. Here is a take on that subject, with the audience asked to participate in Chaucer’s trial as if the jury, and at the end give a verdict as to whether or not he was guilty of the crime.

Semmelweis was first performed at the Edinburgh Festival, and De Raptu Meo had its first reading in Inner Temple, with Derek Jacobi in the part of Geoffrey Chaucer, and its first full performance in the same venue with Ian Hogg in the lead role.

 

 

G. K. Chesterton

 

Orthodoxy 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. Anticipating much modern theology, Catholic and Protestant, Chesterton’s apologia is more personalistic than propositional. He understands that, in order to be credible, a belief system must appeal to the heart as well as to the mind. No one has set out more engagingly the reasons for believing in Christianity as the timeless truth about who we are, and rejecting the alternatives as fads and fashions. Jon Elsby, author of Light in the Darkness and Wrestling With the Angel, has written extensively on Christian apologists and apologetics, and has penned an illuminating introduction for this edition of Orthodoxy, which also contains brief notes and an index. Available for purchase in paperback here.

 

 

Harry Greenberg

 

Letters to Kafka The funny, tragic, sometimes hilarious letters to a latterday Franz Kafka, whose insights into the existential dilemmas of contemporary being continue to be misunderstood, and sometimes dangerously so. Available for purchase as an ebook here.

 

 

Jon Elsby

 

Heroes and Lovers What is a tenor? What makes some tenors great? Why are tenors so rare? Heroes and Lovers suggests answers to these questions and offers critical essays on twenty-six tenors and shorter assessments of thirty-four others. The tenors covered range from Francesco Tamagno, the first Otello, and Fernando de Lucia, both of whom recorded in the early years of the twentieth century, to Joseph Calleja and Rolando Villazón today. The book also comprises an introductory essay and separate essays on the early tenors of the recorded era, the popular tenors, the British tenors, and the specialist categories of Mozart tenors and Heldentenors. This is a personal selection and it will please, stimulate, provoke, and infuriate in equal measure. Available for purchase in paperback here.

 

‘This truly is a book for lovers of the Art of Singing and the tenor voice.’ Alan Bilgora in The Record Collector

 

Coming Home Coming Home looks, in the broadest sense, at the Catholic Church and the phenomenon of conversion. It considers, among other things, the varied components of Catholic identity; the complex, multifaceted relations between Catholicism and postmodernism, and between Church doctrine and pastoral praxis; and the controversies between so-called conservatives and liberals over the direction the Church should take in the future.

 

The Catholic Church, with its 2,000 years of accumulated doctrine and definition, claims to be the one and only divinely appointed repository of religious truth and wisdom, authoritatively taught and preserved for transmission to posterity. No other institution makes such a claim. It would be unwise to dismiss that claim in accordance with some dogmatic presupposition rather than weighing it impartially according to the evidence. Coming Home invites the reader to consider all the evidence before making up his or her own mind.

 

Available for purchase in paperback here.

 

Light In the Darkness: Four Christian Apologists Christian apologetics is an important area of intellectual endeavour and achievement, standing at the boundaries between theology, philosophy and literature. Yet it has been largely neglected by historians of literature and ideas.

 

In these essays, the author attempts to establish apologetics as a subject deserving of respect in its own right. He analyses the apologetic arguments and strategies of four of the greatest Christian apologists of the twentieth century – Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers, and C. S. Lewis. He shows how different lines of argument support each other and converge on the same conclusion: that what Chesterton called ‘orthodoxy’ and Lewis ‘mere Christianity’ represents the fundamental truth about the relations between human beings, the universe, and God. Available for purchase in paperback here.

 

Wrestling With the Angel: A Convert’s Tale Who am I? Am I an autonomous being, able to define myself by my own free choices, or a created being with a given human nature, living in a world which, in significant respects, does not depend on me? Are these two views necessarily opposed?

 

Wrestling With the Angel is one man’s attempt to answer those questions. Raised as a Protestant, the author lost his faith in his teenage years, and then gradually regained it – but in an unexpected form. This is the story of a spiritual and intellectual journey from Protestantism to atheism, and beyond: a journey which finally, and much to the author’s surprise, reached its terminus in the Catholic Church. Available for purchase in paperback here.

 

‘Wresting With the Angel has the form of an intellectual autobiography, along the lines of Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua but, like that older work, has much wider implications than that of a merely personal story. Elsby’s style is engaging and the meaning of his prose – unlike much modern theology – clear.’ Stephen Lovatt

 

Seeing is Believing Seeing is Believing develops themes touched on in an earlier book by the same author, Coming Home (also published by CentreHouse Press), but with greater focus on the relations between faith and culture, in the broadest sense. It’s a crucially important issue for our time, addressed by several American apologists, though very few on the UK side of the Atlantic have shown much interest in it. In fact, British Catholics in general – both clergy and laity, with only a handful of exceptions – have been content, in recent years, to leave apologetics to the Americans. Seeing is Believing seeks in some way to redress that balance. Available for purchase as an ebook here.

 

Reassessing the Chesterbelloc Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton were two of the biggest names on the Georgian literary scene. They were what today would be called ‘public intellectuals’. Each wrote nearly a hundred books in a variety of genres and on a huge range of subjects. But they are now almost entirely unread. Available for purchase as an ebook here.

 

The author argues that it is time to reassess their achievement. He maintains that, while their work is uneven and some of it is frankly ephemeral, their best work deserves to be rediscovered and read without bias. They will then be seen as writers who offered a robust critique of modernity, and thereby have provided us with resources with which to question and challenge the facile ideas, ingrained prejudices, and lazy assumptions of the ambient culture.

 

 

Peter Cowlam

 

Ghosts in the Machine Ghosts in the Machine is a collection of finely crafted short-form poems, marked out for their candour and observational precision. The book is presented as a CentreHouse Press parallel text, with Angela D’Ambra’s translations into Italian alongside the original poems in English. Available for purchase in hardback here.

 

‘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 O’Connor, 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

 

‘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, author of Anthropocene

 

Early Novels and Short Fiction Early Novels and Short Fiction 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.

 

Early Novels and Short Fiction covers the period from 1974 to 1998 (approximately), and opens with Penumbra, a collection of short stories originally having as centrepiece the four related narratives now comprising Entry Without Visas – ‘Michael Grading’, ‘The House of Folly’, ‘Two Dissidents’, and ‘Homeward Angel’. Entry Without Visas is in itself the first of three novellas under the collective title The Border and Back, the others being Humber and Call Bridgland Jolley. In the latter a Western think tank is forced to confront the possibility that it might be its own usefulness, and no longer the policies and institutions of others, that it is its job to examine and reflect on.

 

The short stories and three novellas are followed by the first full novel, Bim Shay, a re-imagining of the detective yarn, whose several strands are narrated by Adrian Fixt. Fixt works for a mysterious and little-known civil service quango called the Department, supposedly brought into being in a reactive age of Toryism (the book was written at the height of Thatcherism, or courtesy the US in the era of Reaganomics).

 

The Department’s sole function is to protect and uphold the virtues of capitalism. Its officers work closely with all police forces throughout the UK, and take an interest in any case where successful exponents of the free-market payola system suffer criminal harm. Fixt is based in West London, where a murder case leads him to the London home of an American adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Other cases follow, but at every step the bureaucracy seeks to thwart his investigations. Fathoming why is key to his inquiries.

 

Electric Letters Z, first published in 1998, has at its centre Alistair Wye, the narrator, a man of exaggerated refinement. He occupies the slave position in a master-slave relationship, and is in rebellion against his master. The ‘master’, Marshall Zob, is a self-styled latter-day Dickens and champion of the oppressed, but in reality is a mediocrity, who through powerful social connections has established himself, as novelist, as the ‘best of his generation’. The plot revolves round Wye’s research into Zob’s archive and his own diary entries detailing a life in work for one of the nation’s bookish heavyweights. Ironically the book was picked up by a London agent and shown to half a dozen editors, one of whom awarded it a ‘near miss’. But that’s as far as it got. It was later repackaged under the title Who’s Afraid of the Booker Prize? and went on to win the 2015 Quagga Prize for Literary Fiction.

 

Caliban’s Machine, which completes the collection, is the one novel for which formal research was carried out. Its author wanted to know what an arts college was and how it worked, and so enrolled for a course in Performance Writing at Dartington College of Arts, in 1996, an institution that no longer exists. The novel is a memoir written from the point of view of George du Plé, a young English poet whose background is blue collar halfway to middle-class. He has got himself involved with an English family of entrenched pedigree and tradition, surname Little, custodians of an academic press, the Tralatition Press. Given that George shows too much interest in one of the Little daughters (Alex), arrangements are made for his removal to an avant-garde arts faculty in New York, the Donns Watson. When du Plé writes letters home intended for Alex, they fall into the hands of John Royce, who becomes his editor, and through a raft of annotations has his say on an exiled poet’s memoir – a memoir of lovelorn, artistic despair.

 

Available for purchase in hardback here.

 

Utopia The resourceful Zora Murillo lands amid mystery and intrigue in a quaint old English market town. Few know the source of her unfathomable wealth when the hotel she buys, the Pleiades, is transformed into a living cabaret act and the scene of political reprisal. And what also of the shadowy M, or Em, or Emoticon, as he styles himself, who claims only to be the writer of a gossip column? His rapport with Zora suggests he knows what it is that has brought her to the town of Hoe. Moreover, M has played his part in aiding her father, an acknowledged leader in AI and robotics, in resisting the changes brought to his country, with its so-called F regime. The coup led by General Forsiss, who in no sense of irony refers to his brave new state as Utopia, might be an ocean away, but the scars it has left are deep and permanent. Exactly what grief is it that the Forsiss regime has inflicted on the Murillo family, drawing its net ever tighter? Dr Murillo has lain awake at night fearing the midnight knock, and the black van waiting outside, knowing little of Zora’s ingenious attempts to rid them both of the clutches of Forsiss and his cronies.

 

Across the Rebel Network Anno centres a federated Europe in an uncertain, and not-too-distant digital future, when politics, the media and mass communications have fused into one amorphous whole. He works for the Bureau of Data Protection (BDP), a federal government department responsible for monitoring the full range of material, in all media, posted into cyberspace. The BDP is forced to do this when rebel states are seceding, small satellites once of the federation but now at a remove from it, economically and socially. A handful of organised outsiders threatens to undermine the central state through a concerted propaganda war, using the federation’s own digital infrastructure. It is this climate of mutual suspicion that to Anno makes inevitable decades of digital guerrilla warfare. While his department takes steps to prevent this, he doesn’t reckon on the intervention of his old college sparring partner, Craig Diamond, who is now a powerful media mogul. The two engage in combat conducted through cyberspace, in a rare concoction of literary sci-fi. Available for purchase in paperback here.

 

‘Across the Rebel Network is a worthy successor to Peter Cowlam’s Who’s Afraid of the Booker Prize? The two novels together compose a single narrative: a dazzlingly inventive, bitingly satirical, and savagely funny critique of postmodern culture and society. They are an Apes of God for our time.’ Jon Elsby

 

‘Peppered throughout with references to Nabokov’s Bend Sinister, Across the Rebel Network shares something of the purpose and aesthetic of that predecessor. It’s a good night now, but not for mothing.’ Jack d’Argus

 

New King Palmers Winner of the 2018 Quagga Prize for Literary Fiction. 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 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. Available for purchase in paperback here.

 

Marisa The 1970s. Bruce takes over a financial consultancy firm founded by his father, and Marisa inherits property. Love, lust and money drive them both. Then their relationship meets its first challenge. While that sends Bruce further into the world of commerce, Marisa flirts with the politics of resistance.

Twenty-five years on from their 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 tumultuous relationship, is torn between his harmonious family life, and renewing contact with Marisa. Finally, when he does decide on a course of action, he has to face the truth of not having grasped the cultural separation their two different views of the world have wrought over the last quarter century.

 

‘…an intricate psychological and profound journey…. Extraordinarily mature and assured….’ Malcolm Stern

 

‘A complex and subtle sweep through the terrains of Western culture.’ Jennifer Armstrong

 

‘A fiery collision of interests not without its pathos….’ Jack d’Argus

 

‘…the attraction of opposites and a love doomed to fail….’ Stephen Lovatt

 

‘The book recalled…Charles Arrowby…in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea.’ David James

 

Who’s Afraid of the Booker Prize? Winner of the 2015 Quagga Prize for Literary Fiction. For Alistair Wye, assistant to ‘top’ novelist Marshall Zob, Zob makes just two mistakes. First, he plans a commemorative book celebrating the life and work of his dead mentor, John Andrew Glaze, whose theory of ‘literary time’ is of dubious philosophical pedigree. Second, Zob turns the whole literary world on its head through the size of advance he instructs his agent to negotiate for his latest, and most mediocre novel to date.

Secretly Wye keeps a diary of Zob’s professional and private life. Comic, resolute, Wye stalks through its every page, scattering his pearls with an imperious hand, while an unsuspecting Zob ensures perfect conditions for the chronicler of his downfall.

Set in the relatively safe remove of London’s beau monde in the early 1990s, Who’s Afraid of the Booker Prize? unremittingly debunks the phenomenon of literary celebrity. The plot revolves round a researcher working through an archive of computer discs, emails and faxes, and his own diary entries recording his reactions to life in proximity of bookish heavyweight Marshall Zob. It’s a roaring satire, with a serious message, and remarkably funny, in the best English comedic tradition. Available for purcase in paperback here.

‘Altogether, a wicked glance at the farce of prizes and the hype that precedes them.’ David James

 

‘…this gem of a book…. Superbly written, witty, intelligent…’ Danny, an Amazon reviewer

 

‘Deliciously wicked and extraordinarily funny, Who’s Afraid of the Booker Prize? is satirical eloquence at its best….’ Book Viral

 

The Obituary of Ad Dawilde Adrian Dawilde, archetypal 1970s college dropout, trashed the study of maths and physics, and one day literally walked out, putting on a backpack and thumbing a lift north. His meteoric rise from kitchen boy in the Moray Firth Hotel to billionaire ends in his early fifties. By then he heads a commercial empire, with interests in electronics, travel, banking, insurance, health – the whole capitalist enterprise – but now he is terminally ill.

As he lies dying the world wants to know what it was, what was the vital step, what was the thing he did that transformed his life from hotel slave to capitalist entrepreneur. And what is the secret of the A4 envelope he so preciously guards in his last days? When Frank Argyll is called on as one of Dawilde’s obituarists, it seems the world will at last find out. But there’s another story Dawilde wants to tell, and Argyll is the only person he can tell it to.

 

Opus Thirty Three Bagatelles Opus Thirty Three Bagatelles is a collection of finely crafted haikuesque poems, marked out for their candour and observational precision. Available for purchase as an ebook here.

 

‘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 O’Connor, author of The Vagabond Lover

 

‘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

 

All I recall,

 

under

the white flannel

 

of a cold compress,

 

is a sail

unfurled

 

to the ocean.

 

Laurel 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 O’Connor, author of The Vagabond Lover

 

Manifesto Manifesto is a sequence of haikuesque poems. It is aimed as a counter-blast at the political and financial institutions complicit in the deceptions of 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.

 

The smoke

of rebellion

 

plumes

 

to the heavens

below

 

my window.

 

 

CentreHouse Press Kids’ Books

Power McTeal

 

Aggie and the Ice Floe Aggie and the Ice Floe is an adventure story about a young boy called Aggie, whose sleepy world is woken up to a first fall of snow. When Aggie rushes outside to play, he doesn’t expect quite the adventure the snow has brought with it, and the friendship he will form with a balloonist called Brandon, who rescues Aggie as he gets into difficulty playing on a frozen river. A children’s picture book, Aggie and the Ice Floe is beautifully illustrated by artist Dawn Hunter.

 

Aggie and the Air Balloon The ebook version of Power McTeal’s Aggie and the Ice Floe, her magical adventure story about a young boy called Aggie, whose sleepy world is woken up to a first fall of snow. When Aggie rushes outside to play, he doesn’t expect quite the adventure the snow has brought with it, and the friendship he will form with a balloonist called Brandon, who rescues Aggie as he gets into difficulty playing on a frozen river. A children’s picture book, Aggie and the Ice Floe , cover illustration by artist Dawn Hunter.

 

Available from Amazon Kindle USA, Amazon Kindle UK, from a choice of other ebook retailers here, and as an audiobook here.

 

The Emperor’s Favourite Elephant One day a sly and hungry jackal thinks to trick the Emperor’s favourite elephant into taking him to green and fertile pastures where he can get a good meal, without having to work for it. But he doesn’t bargain for the kind of destination the elephant has in store for him. Power McTeal’s eventful little tale of life in the wilds.

 

Available from Amazon Kindle USA, Amazon Kindle UK, from a choice of other ebook retailers here, and as an audiobook here.  

 

 

Rights

 

Details of rights available for a selection of our titles can be found at our Frankfurt Rights portal, here.