Set against the backdrop of World War II, the story follows Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Earl Grady as he navigates a tense atmosphere of espionage and suspicion. Tasked with alerting local law enforcement about potential threats from Japanese residents, Grady's world spirals into chaos when a committee member is murdered shortly before the Pearl Harbor attack. The discovery of the body, gruesomely impaled by a samurai sword, leads the FBI to suspect Japanese spies, raising questions about loyalty and prejudice during a time of war.
Connolly's comedy of manners weaves together a domestic tableaux of characters
- those with old-fashioned manners, tabloid manners, and no manners at all -
in a satire on oedipal envy, neighbourly rivalry and the shameless stupidity
of our fame-fuelled society.
Lucas Cage can now lay claim to the only part of his father's enormous legacy that he ever craved - The Works, the disused old printing house hard by the Thames. Lucas invites special people to share it with him: 'the family', as he comes to call them. 'Connolly is a funny man . . . He creates a sense of intimacy and collusion with his reader that is rare in contemporary fiction.' Financial Times 'The Works shows off Joseph Connolly's verbal glee, his relentless enjoyment of voices at full tilt. And in the monstrously loveable building, he offers readers a special treat.' Independent 'Connolly manages to suggest an overarching allegory of almost Beckettian largeness and openness . . . Entertaining, but emotionally and intellectually involving too, Connolly's memorable novel is a story of the light that failed.' Daily Telegraph
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. Meanwhile their fifteen-year-old son Colin has fallen in love with the fabulous Carol, but her unforgiving brother Terry would preferto see Colin dead. 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 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? Winter Breaks is a seriously funny sequel to Connolly's best-selling Summer Things.
Though foot-and-mouth has stopped hunting, Lady Bobbin, MFH and formidable chatelaine of Compton Bobbin, has assembled an oddly assorted Yuletide gathering. Her beautiful but silent daughter Philadelphia is torn between two suitors: Lord Lewis, eligible but dull, and Paul Fotheringay, penniless, and charming.
The repetitions and ruminations of a multitude of inner voices, the comic set pieces and the horrified hyperreal prose are as spot-on as ever.' Guardian '[An] immaculately plotted comedy of manners ... this is the sort of book it is quite impossible to put down once you have opened it.' The Times
A satire of modern life, by the author of Poor Souls, This Is It and Stuff. Elizabeth has her heart on a traditional English seaside holiday, and Howard, her well-to-do estate-agent husband, agrees to pay. But Howard wants to stay in London with the object of his lust, Zoo-Zoo.
Eric Pizer can just about keep his two lives going: weekends in the country with his wife, Bunty, getting sympathy he doesn't deserve; Mondays to Fridays in London with his pretend job, a house full of misfit tenants, and a girlfriend with secrets of her own. But when one sunny morning Eric is hit by a bus and breaks his leg, this on top of the threatening phone calls from a man called Slingsby, Eric suspects that things are about to become very complicated indeed. Joseph Connolly's novel is a tour through the disintegrating world of inveterate liar and accident-prone Eric. Along the way we meet a cast of hilarious characters: the wild and angry Fiona, always bumping in to things; Henry Vole, one of the tenants, addicted to tea, Hobnobs - addicted to Fiona; a couple of decorators who seem to be systematically demolishing Eric's house; and of course the blackmailer Slingsby (Eric thinks he knew the Krays). Once again, in This Is It, Joseph Connolly shows that he is the country's most original writer of black comedy.
