Contributions
In the following books, Joseph Connolly has contributed either an introduction, an essay or essays.
MY LIFE AND TIMES by Jerome K. Jerome (1992)
BOOKER 30: A Celebration of the Booker Prize for Fiction 1969-1998 (1998)
BRITISH GREATS (2000)
THE BOOK OF USELESS INFORMATION (2002)
THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE: 35 Years of the Best in Contemporary Fiction 1969-2003 (2003)
BRITISH COMEDY GREATS (2003)
ICONS IN THE FIRE: The Decline of Almost Everybody in the British Film Industry 1984-2000 by Alexander Walker (2004). Joseph Connolly is Alexander Walker's Literary Executor.
PRIVATE PASSIONS by Michael Berkeley (2005)
FOLIO 60: A Bibliography of The Folio Society 1947-2007 by Paul Nash (2007)
A HEDONIST'S GUIDE TO LIFE (2007)
ON THE ART OF MAKING UP ONE'S MIND by Jerome K. Jerome (2008)
Poor Souls (Faber and Faber 1995)
Barry and Susan are married and would hate each other, if only they could be bothered. Gavin and Moira are also married, and they hate each other quite openly. Barry’s a failed editor who drinks too much. Gavin’s got a job too boring to talk about. Moira cooks for dinner parties and has a very peculiar way of looking after her husband. And Susan simply doesn’t know what she wants…. Taking place over the course of one week in 1985, Joseph Connolly’s darkly comic novel charts the events that rip through the lives and loves of Barry, Susan, Gavin and Moira, in a week fuelled by booze and loathing.
ISBN: 978-0-571-23264-2
Connolly remorselessly points up social pretensions with the eye of Dostoevsky...this satire on human behaviour is timeless.
The Independent
Left: Earlier covers. Right: The Audio Cassette, read by Rik Mayall
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This is It (Faber and Faber 1996)
When Eric Pizer is knocked down by a bus one morning and ends up on crutches, the business of keeping all his lives intact becomes just that bit more difficult. Weekends in the country with his wife; weekdays in London with his pretend job and certifiable girlfriend, Fiona; and sinister and threatening phone calls from someone called Slingsby. Life for Eric is about to become very complicated.
Earlier covers
A dark and extraordinarily funny tour through the disintegrating world of inveterate liar Eric, This is It is a dark and brilliant comedy of manners.
ISBN: 978-0-571-23262-8
It is Connolly's skill to get the reader to laugh at what should make you cry or at least wince
TLS
Stuff (Faber and Faber 1997)
To Emily, her interior design business is everything, but to her clueless husband, Kevin, it’s just a load of stuff. He despairs of her, and turns instead to Milly – but their brief time together in Brighton has unforeseen and dangerous consequences. Meanwhile, Emily embarks on an affair with a PR man called Raymond. But it soon becomes apparent that he’s much keener on her daughter Shelley…
A rich, darkly funny and densely plotted novel, Stuff moves at an unflagging pace towards a surprising and electrifying denouement.
IBSN: 978-0-571-23263-5
Earlier covers
You find yourself swept up into a whirlwind plot…Behind the chaos, a blacker and more sardonic wit bites crisply
The Times
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Summer Things (Faber and Faber 1998)
An unforgettable trip to the further shores of lust, snobbery and adultery, Summer Things is the much-loved bestselling comedy by one of Britain’s funniest novelists. With a whirlwind plot and characters who let nothing stand between them and pleasure, Summer Things hurtles along with exhilarating momentum – unstoppable, startling and hilarious.
IBSN: 978-0-571-23265-9
...Connolly has established himself as a very English comic author, in the tradition of P.G. Wodehouse
The Times
Left: 1-3 Earlier covers. Far right: DVD cover
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Winter Breaks (Faber and Faber 1999)
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, even if it means resorting to crime. Meanwhile, their fifteen-year-old son Colin has fallen in love with the fabulous Carol but her unforgiving brother Terry would prefer to see Colin dead.
Earlier covers
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 (and married) 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.
ISBN: 978-0-571-23451-6
Waspish, morose, neatly crafted and distressingly funny.
New Statesman
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It Can't Go On (Faber and Faber 2000)
At just another drinks party he very nearly chose not to go to, Jeremy catches sight of Maria and is instantly attracted to her. Completely under her spell, he embarks on an affair and becomes answerable to her every whim. Meanwhile his wife Anne orders him out of the house for entirely different reasons–she’s concluded he’s having an affair with the nanny of their two children. As an unstoppable chain of events follows, the lives of Jeremy, Anne and an ever expanding circle of characters are changed forever in a novel rich with humour, absurdity, sex, pain and puzzlement.
ISBN: 978-0-571-23453-0
Earlier covers
… Like a weird mix of Dickens and Martin Amis…This is the sort of book it is quite impossible to put down.
The Times
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SOS (Faber and Faber 2001)
It takes just six days and nights to cross the Atlantic on the Transylvania – a vast and luxurious liner – and by the time the ship docks in New York, the lives of all 1600 people on board will have been changed. What seemed to be a set of inviolate futures now lies in utter disarray amid the deep waters surrounding this singular and floating castaway city.
ISBN: 978-0-571-23452-3
Earlier covers
A virtuoso performance
The Sunday Times
…SOS is in another league altogether. His fans – and there are many – will be please to find his trademark style in full swing.
The Guardian
Works, The (Faber and Faber 2003)
Lucas Cage can now lay claim to the only part of his father’s legacy he ever craved – The Works – a disused old print house by the Thames. Lucas invites special people to share it with him, and Jamie Dear is one of those who grasps the opportunity to escape his wife and cramped flat to be close to Lucas. Jamie becomes a catalyst linking the lives of all the other disparate souls amid the frailty, lust and dependency, while the clam and omniscient spirit of Lucas hovers above them all.
ISBN: 978-0-571-23454-7
Earlier covers
Joseph Connolly creates a sense of intimacy and collusion with his reader that is rare in contemporary fiction.
Financial Times
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Love is Strange (Faber and Faber 2005)
Clifford is an eight-year old schoolboy; Annette, his troubled elder sister, is on the cusp of adolescence and coping with a convent education. Their mother, Gillian, an archetypal fifties housewife, is devoted to Clifford until life and events propel her elsewhere. Her husband, Arthur is dictatorial and aloof, and in time his inner turmoils are to result in swift and devastating consequences for the family.
Earlier cover
Rich in cultural detail of Britain throughout the second half of the twentieth century, Love is Strange is a beautifully written and quite unforgettable novel of family life framed by a darkly English humour.
ISBN: 978-0-571-22709-9
...A tragedy of embarrassment, where every detail is comic
Adam Mars-Jones: The Observer
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Jack the Lad and Bloody Mary (Faber and Faber 2007)
1939, Jackie and Mary are just two of the millions of ordinary Londoners whose lives are changed by the most extraordinary of circumstances. Unmarried yet very much in love, their life together before the war is ordered and conventional enough: Jackie’s work as a labourer brings in modest but adequate funds while Mary is content in her role about the house.
The coming of war changes all of this as under the influence of the slyly affable Jonathan Leakey, a go-between for the urbane, sinister and thoroughly corrupting Nigel Wisley, Jackie is inveigled into underworld activities which soon earn him the local nickname, Jack the Lad. Jackie’s friend and erstwhile drinking partner, Dickie Wheat, finds his life similarly altered; what with doctors being more in demand than ever before. Perhaps most changed though, is Mary; the circumstances of whose transformation make up the bloody heart and soul of this novel.
Earlier cover
A story of love and domestic routine unsettled by a seemingly distant war come to home shores,
Jack the Lad and Bloody Mary is an unforgettable depiction of life during wartime by a contemporary master.
ISBN: 978-0-571-23468-4
Reviews
Why isn't Joseph Connolly more famous? It is one of the imponderables of modern British fiction. His literary pedigree is impeccable ... If any book is likely to change this state of affairs, it's Jack the Lad and Bloody Mary… an interesting companion piece to that other recent sideways look at London during the Second World War, The Night Watch by Sarah Waters ... while both books focus on the war's hidden stories, Connolly's tells a more disturbing and less redemptive tale, about Londoners who were not cut out to be heroes or whose moral compasses were shattered by the war.
The Telegraph
Connolly reveals a story of unwanted pregnancy, backstreet abortionists and Mary's own mission to 'ease the lot of afflicted women' .. This enormous book contains much that is grim, bloody, almost overwhelming to read, but it proves Connolly to be an original and masterly novelist.
The Daily Mail
Home Fire Burning, Joseph Connolly's early novels were light comedies [More...]
The Scotsman
The 'hell trap' of being a writer of comedy [More...]
Camden New Journal
'We was all normal, one time' [More...]
Daily Telegraph
Into the depths [More...]
The Guardian
Losers in the people’s war [More...]
Evening Standard
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Non Fiction
Collecting Modern First Editions (Studio Vista 1977)
The first unstuffy guide to collecting, including many more popular writers such as Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming and P.G. Wodehouse.
P.G. Wodehouse: An Illustrated Biography (Orbis 1979, 1987)
The first British biography of the master, with many previously uncollected photographs and a bibliography. Later re-issued by Thames & Hudson as illustrated.
Jerome K. Jerome: A Critical Biography (Orbis 1982)
The only biography of J.K.J, including a bibliography. Joseph Connolly also wrote the introduction to the Folio Society edition of J.K.J's autobiography, My Life And Times. 2009 marks the 150th anniversary of J.K.J's birth, and the 120th anniversary of Three Men In A Boat. Joseph Connolly's Biography will be re-issued by Sutton Publishing.
Modern First Editions: Their Value To Collectors (Orbis 1984, 1993)
A complete rewrite of CMFE, with new colour photographs. Two more revised editions were published by Macdonald and Little, Brown. Reissued in 1987 by Thames and Hudson, as illustrated.
The Book Quiz Book (Penguin 1984)
The Book Quiz Book
The most amusing and informative book quiz book–The answers are far longer than the questions. Notable for being the only Penguin ever to have been published in this long, slim format.
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Children's Modern First Editions (Macdonald Orbis 1988)
The first book to tackle this ever more popular subject, with colour original photographs.
Beside The Seaside (Mitchell Beazley 1999, 2002)
A glorious celebration of the British seaside, with scores of vintage black and white pictures, and specially commissioned contemporary colour ones.
All Shook Up: A Flash Of The Fifties (Cassell 2000)
A joyful and nostalgic glimpse of the 1950's, copiously illustrated with very evocative and rare period photographs.
Christmas, And How To Survive It (Little Books 2003)
A short, true and very funny sideways look at the British Christmas, with original cartoons by Gray Jolliffe.
Wodehouse (Haus Publishing 2004)
A short and magnificently illustrated biography with unpublished personal anecdotes, a chronology and bibliography.
