The winner of the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize A sizzling and deeply touching love story between two men, set in the gay biker community of 1970s London In Box Hill, a vivid coming-of-age novel, a young man suddenly wakes up to his gay self—on his eighteenth birthday, when he receives the best gift ever: love and sex. In the woodsy cruising grounds of Box Hill, chubby Colin literally stumbles over glamorous Ray—ten years older, leather-clad, cool, handsome, a biker, and a top. (Colin, if largely unformed, is nevertheless decidedly a bottom.) Colin narrates his love—conveying how mind-blowing being with Ray is—in comically humble-pie terms. “If there are leaders then there must be followers, and I had followership skills in plenty just waiting to be tapped. To this day I can’t see a fat kid in shorts without wanting to rush over and give him what comfort I can. To tell him it won’t always be like this.” Mars-Jones uses Colin’s naivete to give a fresh view of the world and of love. Before long, however, homophobia, class, family strife, and loss rear their ugly heads. Yet in the end, it seems Colin’s modest view oddly takes in the widest horizon: he learns that “people can care about anything.” A surprise and a pleasure, Box Hill is an intensely moving short novel.

Winner of the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize. 'I took one look at him, and I saw what he really wanted.' On the Sunday of his eighteenth birthday, in 1975, Colin takes a walk on Box Hill, a biker hang-out in Surrey. Timid, awkward, and very much out of his element, he accidentally trips over Ray, a biker taking a nap under a tree. Ray takes immediate control of the situation, and Colin moves in with him that night. A sizzling, sometimes shocking, and strangely tragic love story between two men, Box Hill is a stunning novel of desire and domination by one of Britain's most accomplished writers. 'Mars-Jones's prose is exceptionally nimble, dry, humorously restrained, very English, with a little Nabokovian velvet too. He can describe more or less anything and make it interesting.' -James Wood, London Review of Books 'A tender exploration of the love that truly dare not speak its name - that between master and slave. On his 18th birthday, Colin literally stumbles upon a strapping biker twice his age, and falls into a long-term relationship characterised by devotion, mystery, and submission. In plain unadorned prose, Mars-Jones shows us the tender, everyday nature of this. Self-deprecating, sad, and wise.' -Fiona McGregor 'I very much enjoyed Box Hill. It is a characteristic Mars-Jones mixture of the shocking, the endearing, the funny, and the sad, with an unforgettable narrator. The sociological detail is as ever acutely entertaining.' -Margaret Drabble

Judas Coyne is a collector of the macabre: a cookbook for cannibals . . . a used hangman's noose . . . a snuff film. An aging death-metal rock god, his taste for the unnatural is as widely known to his legions of fans as the notorious excesses of his youth. But nothing he possesses is as unlikely or as dreadful as his latest purchase, an item he discovered on the Internet: I will sell my stepfather's ghost to the highest bidder . . . For a thousand dollars, Jude has become the owner of a dead man's suit, said to be haunted by a restless spirit. But what UPS delivers to his door in a black heart-shaped box is no metaphorical ghost, no benign conversation piece. Suddenly the suit's previous owner is everywhere: behind the bedroom door . . . seated in Jude's restored Mustang . . . staring out from his widescreen TV. Waiting—with a gleaming razor blade on a chain dangling from one hand . . .

Dr. Howard Sterling is on his way home when he comes upon a woman in a snow drift. Meanwhile Martha Spicer, elderly spinster, takes an interest in taming one of the local boys who seem to run wild in the streets. Then Janet disappears without telling the doctor about her true identity. But the hand of Providence is about to bring these four souls together in a marvelous way.

In this volume of selected letters of the novelist and poet George Meredith (1828-1909), the editor has included letters with such figures as Virginia Woolf (Stephen at the time), Paul Valery, Thomas Carlyle, Madame Daudet, Edmund Gosse, Alfred Tennyson, James Thomson and many others. The letters, most of them previously unpublished, reveal the myriad world of Meredith's life and thought. The selection includes the two earliest letters extant written by Meredith just after he had left Neuwied, his school in Germany. It also includes Meredith's first letter to Chapman & Hall concerning his project for the publication of his first volume of verse, and another Meredith wrote to the same publisher in connection with a cookery book which his first wife, Mary Ellen Peacock, was preparing for publication.