Robert Niven's writing offers a sharp, satirical look at the music industry and its descent into sentimentality. His style is energetic, often delving into the darker underbelly of modern society. Niven's approach is raw and direct, providing readers with an unflinching glimpse into a cynical and ambitious world. His works serve as a critical commentary on the corruption and superficiality found within the art world and beyond.
An instant Sunday Times bestseller, O Brother is by turns heart-breaking and hilarious - evoking a working-class childhood of the 1970-80s and trying to answer the questions that often haunt the survivors of suicide
In a busy maternity ward, first-time father Dan meets Jada, a dad welcoming his fifth - no, sixth? - child into the world. Dan and Jada come from very different places: both called Glasgow. Dan is a successful TV writer with a townhouse in the West End and a shiny Tesla ready to drive his wife and baby home. Jada is a hustling, small-time criminal who is already planning how to separate Dan from some of the luxuries Jada has never been able to enjoy in his tiny flat in a Brutalist sixties council block. Both men find that the birth of their sons has fired their ambitions. Dan plans to walk away from his saccharine TV success and finally knuckle down to writing that novel he always felt he had in him. While, for Jada, it's the opportunity for one last get-rich-quick scheme - ripping off a local airport. When a tragedy occurs, their worlds are brought closer than either could ever have imagined - close enough that it could mean destruction for both of them . . .
But it's also a proper novel about the Trumpian era, of the reality TV era, the fake news era.
Only two things would improve Gary Irvine's life - children and a lower golf handicap. Both are unlikely- Gary's wife Pauline is planning to leave him for a self-made carpet millionaire, and unfortunately Gary is an appalling golfer. Meanwhile, in the murky depths of the criminal underclass, Gary's luckless brother Lee has botched up too many drug deals, and local crime overlord Ranta Campbell understands the PR value of a certain kind of violence to keep people in line. He gives Lee one more job, one last chance to get it right...Then Gary gets smashed on the head by a golf ball and knocked into a coma. He wakes to find that the neurological trauma he's suffered has resulted in some pretty radical side effects - among them an absolutely perfect golf swing.Their stories converge as the two brothers stumble into uncharted territory - Lee towards murder and Gary teeing it up in the Open Championship...
The Son of God is back on Earth and starring on American Pop Star. God takes a look at the Earth around the time of the Renaissance and everything looks pretty good - so he takes a holiday. In Heaven-time this is just a week's fishing trip, but on Earth several hundred years go by. When God returns, he finds all hell has broken loose: world wars, holocausts, famine, capitalism and Christians. Everywhere. There's only one thing for it. They're sending the kid back. JC, reborn, is a struggling musician in New York City, trying to teach the one true commandment: Be Nice! His best chance to win hearts and minds is to enter American Pop Star. But the number one show in America is the unholy creation of a record executive who's more than a match for the Son of God... Steven Stelfox."
"It is 2017 - the time of Trump and Brexit. The time for the return of Steven Stelfox - exactly twenty years on from his Britpop heyday. Now forty-six, and rich beyond the dreams of avarice, he works only occasionally as a music industry 'consultant'. A fixer. A problem solver. He's had a call from his old friend James Trellick, who is now president of Unigram, one of the largest record companies in America. Trellick has a huge headache on his hands in the shape of... Lucius Du Pre. The biggest pop star on earth. Well, he was the biggest pop star on earth. Now he's a helpless junkie and a prolific, unrepentant paedophile. Through a programme of debt restructuring so complex even Trellick can barely understand it, Du Pre is also now massively in hock to the record company. The only way he can possibly pay it off is to embark on an enormous comeback tour he's in no shape to do. The picture is further complicated when the parents of one of Du Pre's 'special friends' begin blackmailing him. If their video gets out, Du Pre's brand will be utterly toxic, taking Unigram down with it. With stealth and cunning Stelfox begins to chart a road out of the nightmare. Needless to say, the body count on this road will be high."--Provided by publisher
Susan Frobisher and Julie Wickham are turning sixty. They live in a small Dorset town and have been friends since school. On the surface Susan has it all - a lovely house and a long marriage to accountant Barry. Life has not been so kind to Julie, but now, with several failed businesses and bad relationships behind her, she has found stability: living in a council flat and working in an old people's home. Then Susan's world is ripped apart when Barry is found dead in a secret flat - or rather, a sex dungeon. It turns out Barry has been leading a double life as a swinger. He's run up a fortune in debts, and now the bank is going to take Susan's home. Until, under the influence of an octogenarian gangster named Nails, the women decide that, rather than let the bank take everything Susan has, they're going to take the bank. With the help of Nails and a thrill-crazy, wheelchair-bound friend they pull off the daring robbery, but soon find that getting away with it is not so easy.
"Frank Brill, a retired small-town newspaper editor, has just been given a terminal diagnosis. Rather than compile a bucket list of all the things he's ever wanted to do in his life, he instead has at the ready his 'fuck-it list'. Because Frank has had to endure more than his fair share of personal misfortune, not to mention having to live through two terms of a Trump presidency. Armed with the names of all those who are to blame for the tragedies that have befallen him, it's time for revenge." Klappentext.
Kennedy Marr is a novelist from the old school. Irish, acerbic, and a borderline alcoholic and sex-addict, his mantra is drink hard, write hard and try to screw every woman you meet. He's writing film scripts in LA, fucking, drinking and insulting his way through Californian society, but also suffering from writers block and unpaid taxes. Then a solution presents itself - Marr is to be the unlikely recipient of the W. F. Bingham Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Modern Literature, an award worth half a million pounds. But it does not come without a price: he must spend a year teaching at the English university where his ex-wife and estranged daughter now reside. As Kennedy acclimatises to the sleepy campus, inspiring revulsion and worship in equal measure, he's forced to reconsider his precarious lifestyle. Incredible as it may seem, there might actually be a father and a teacher lurking inside this 'preening, narcissistic, priapic, sociopath'. Or is there... Straight White Male is a no-holds-barred look into the mid-life crisis and the contemporary male sexual psyche. It is a brilliant new satire from one of Britain's sharpest writers.
SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING NICHOLAS HOULT, ED SKREIN AND JAMES CORDEN. Meet Steven Stelfox. London 1997: New Labour is sweeping into power and Britpop is at its zenith. A&R man Stelfox is slashing and burning his way through the music industry, fuelled by greed and inhuman quantities of cocaine, searching for the next hit record amid a relentless orgy of self-gratification. But as the hits dry up and the industry begins to change, Stelfox must take the notion of cut throat business practices to murderous new levels in a desperate attempt to salvage his career.
