Books by Gerard Woodward

A much-anticipated collection from the Somerset Maugham Award winning poet.

A stunning new collection of stories from the Man Booker Prize and Whitbread Prize shortlisted author.Many of Legoland's stories begin with the seemingly every day, only for a turn of events to land them in an unsettling place where life's normal rules no longer apply. Whether he's writing about a child's birthday party or the invasion of an unnamed country each story is full of Woodward's blacker-than-black humour, fearless surrealism, and poetic phrasing. Included here is his brilliant story 'The Family Whistle', shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award.Legoland celebrates Woodward's trademark gift for wit and surprise: his lithe prose carrying us from comedy to tragedy and back again within a single tale. It confirms him as one of the most gifted and original writers of our time.'Gerard Woodward falls squarely between the comic lunacy of American short-form virtuoso George Saunders and the everyday rhapsodies of Raymond Carver' Time Out

There is no such thing as an ordinary life. But Kenneth Brill's is more extraordinary than most. By the time he is arrested for espionage towards the end of the Second World War he has an incredible story to tell.Under interrogation he describes his unusual childhood, shares the decadent details of his training as a painter at the prestigious Slade School of Art in the 1930s and explains just why he was so very friendly with the prostitutes of London's Soho underworld; he narrates his heroic actions as a camouflage officer before El Alamein, when he helped pull off one of the greatest acts of deception in the history of warfare, and accounts for his part in a night-time break-in of the royal residence of Buckingham Palace.This is a life lived to the full, whether as son, friend, lover, teacher or pupil. The only question is: whose side is he really on?'A huge, complex novel, at turns both blackly funny and bleakly moving, driven by truly original characters' Daily Mail'Clever, subtle, and rewarding' Times Literary Supplement

Gerard Woodward's poetry has long been admired for its sharp and unflinching eye, its fearless surrealism, its blacker-than-black humour, and its ability to find a little abyss in any detail, no matter how innocuous or domestic. Here, his considerations of trampolines, bird-tables and lightbulbs will leave the reader unable to regard those things in quite the same way again; they will also find science-fiction novels compressed to a few stanzas, strange potted biographies, and lists of edicts from long-dead tyrants. However, The Seacunny finds this inimitable voice extend itself in new and unexpected directions, with the poet turning to the natural world and to human relationships in ways that are affecting as they are surprising. This is a book of astonishing range, and declares a new lyric direction in Woodward's poetry.

Contains stories with a mix of humour, pathos, dysfunctional families and disappointed lives, as well as dazzling moments of illumination, and intimations of mortality (in 'A Ford Mondeo' and 'Gardening').

By the author of Booker-shortlisted I'll Go To Bed At Noon. Aldous Jones is in a bad way: his dilapidated house is empty of family but full of hoarded odds and ends that remind him of his dead wife and son.

It is 1970 in the suburbs of north London and, from the untidy comfort of her crowded house, Colette Jones is watching her older brother go to pieces, drinking himself into oblivion on home-made wine.

Ever since Aldous Jones careened over the handlebars of his bicycle in 1955 and landed next to Farmer Evans's first field, it has become a tradition for him to take his family camping in Wales. As the years pass, Aldous's family idyll starts to disintegrate and the farm becomes a place drenched in memory.