Robert Barnard Books

The Ketterick Festival revolves around the Saracen’s Head, a Jacobean inn with its inn-yard and balconies miraculously preserved intact, due to the sloth of successive landlords. Here in festival time are performed the lesser-known masterpieces of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre. This year it is The Chaste Apprentice of Bowe (a play of uncertain authorship, since no one owned up at the time). But the actors find that the Saracen’s Head has been transformed by its new landlord – an Australian know-all with an insatiable curiosity and an instinct for power. The loathsome Des’s activities bring him into conflict with actors, committee, even the performers of Adelaide di Birckenhead, the little-known Donizetti opera that is the other lynchpin of the Festival programme. So adept is Des at fomenting friction and ferreting in the undergrowth of private lives that it is not surprising that it all ends in biers.

Colin Pinnock, on top of the world when he is selected as a junior minister to the new Prime Minister, receives a mysterious note that sends him into a world of mystery and murder.

Assigned as British Princess Helena's personal bodyguard, Scotland Yard Detective Perry Trethowan struggles to defend his own virtue against the lascivious princess while tracking down the methodical killer who is murdering her numerous lovers.

With the Nazis bombing London on a nightly basis, many working-class families sent their children to the comparative safety of the countryside. When the Blitz ended, the families came for their kids...but no one ever came for Simon Thorn. His name appears on no list of the evacuated children. And none of his meager belongings offer any clues as to his origins. Now an adult, newly moved to London, Simon is puzzled by an odd sense of familiarity when he walks down certain streets. He remembers his years of screaming nightmares that would terrify his his bewildered foster parents. And he resolves, once and for all, to find out where he originally came from...even as everything he uncovers suggests that, really, he doesn't want to know. Barnard untangles his riddle with great skill, and is likely to outwit all but a handful of readers - New York TimesIdeal for fans of Ruth Rendell and John Lawton Multi-award-winning author

Caroline Fawley is living in the Yorkshire village of Alderley. Her wealthy boyfriend keeps her in the lap of luxury. Life couldn't get much better. Then her boyfriend Marius goes missing and later a body turns up and that idyllic life is completely shattered. Originally published: 2002.

Inspector Perry Trethowan reads in the obituaries that his estranged father has died under peculiar circumstances: he was fooling around with a form of self-torture called strappado. At the request of his supervisor, Peter returns to his ancestral home to determine if any of his cousins or siblings might have helped the old man to his bizarre end

After a twenty-year absence, Merlyn Cantelo returns to Leeds to attend his late aunt Clarissa's funeral. Far from being welcomed back into the fold of his large and quarrelsome family, he is viewed by many with suspicion and distrust ? especially since his timely reappearance has thwarted the prospect of a tidy inheritance. However, all is more complex than it seems. The teenage Merlyn only fled his home at the vehement insistence of his sometimes clairvoyant aunt, who foresaw for him a life blighted by violence and death. Moreover, the root of this danger supposedly lies somewhere within the family? Merlyn knows that if he is to discover whether his aunt's fears were justified, he must come to terms with his tragic past ? and delve into the murky history of the Cantelo family.

Police superintendent Percy Trethowan finds London's Soho as colorful and full of life as ever--except for the four corpses he discovers in a seedy photography studio. Shot while doing a layout for a health and fitness magazine, the victims left behind a camera loaded with film, but not clues.

Thoroughly updated to include writers such as Caryl Churchill, Brian Friel, Martin Amis and Graham Swift, this book remains the best overall survey of English literature available. Robert Barnard looks selectively at the most important writers within each period from the time of Chaucer, and focuses on one or two of their works in detail. He deals briefly with the earlier periods and more fully with the last two centuries, moving right to the present with a detailed coverage of the post-war novel and theatre. In the best sense eclectic, his book draws together history, criticism, established ideas and fresh views.

Bettina Whitelaw is a grand dame of the English literary scene. Approaching eighty, with a beautiful flat in Holland Park and a comfortable income, her life is not dissimilar to that of her wealthy, elegant neighbours. But her background most certainly is. Brought up in Bundaroo, a small town in the Australian outback, Bettina's childhood was dominated by the relentlessly blazing sun, the long daily walk to school, and by the simmering animosities of smalltown life. Aged sixteen, Bettina managed to escape to begin her literary career in Europe. But now, more than sixty years later, her past is coming back to haunt her. As she embarks upon the painful process of writing her memoirs, images from her childhood begin to re-surface. And when her former housekeeper is the victim of a violent attack, Bettina begins to realise that she herself is in serious danger, a danger that has its roots in a small, dusty outback town.