Island To Island

Third major collection from award-winning poetry Gerard Woodward. His first book for 5 years.

Born in London in 1961, Gerard Woodward studied painting and anthropology. His two previous collections, Householder (1991) and After The Deafening (1994), were published by Chatto. He has won, among other prizes, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Eric Gregory Award. 'The Madness of Heracles' was runner-up in the most recent Avron International Poetry Competition. Gerard Woodward lives in Manchester.

In Island to Island, his third collection of poetry for Chatto, Gerard Woodward ventures into more hostile, less familiar territory. An Arabian desert, the moon, thinly-populated archipelagos are all visited in what emerges as an investigation into the nature of social space. A giraffe trapper finds that a successful trap must closely resemble a giraffe's own home; the 'suburban glass' of starter-home conservatories glazes and crysallises the lives of newly-weds. With his characteristic exuberance and ability to stand the world on its head, Woodward combines tichly imagined poems about half-invented lands with poetry that transforms the ordinary into the fantastical, where baths become oceans and ceilings lunar landscapes. Nor is the body exempt from this exploration of borders and limits. In one poem, two 'gurning' contestants find that they've overstepped some boundary of humanness and in 'The Madness of Heracles', a long retelling of the myth of the twelve labours, human strength is put to the test in a poem which evolves into a rhapsody of love, loss, toil and redemption.

Caravan Thieves

A beguiling, disconcerting and marvellously readable collection of short stories by the Booker-shortlisted author of August and I'll Go to Bed at Noon.

He writes with subtlety and skill... beautifully manipulating the language which veers and soars from the vernacular to the high-flown and summoning characters that are at once believable and sympathetic

In clean, uncomplicated prose inlaid with images of striking lyricism, Woodward explores the bizarre possibilities of ordinary people's lives

The down-to-earth dialogue and the deadpan delivery remain doggedly realistic, and some stories retain not only the ring of truth but also its open-ended structure

Uncanny, absurd and at times macabre, these stories magically combine a poet's eye for imagery with a novelist's complexity of theme

The author's humour often glimmers quietly and there is surreal black comedy

Gerard Woodward falls squarely between the comic lunacy of American short-form virtuoso George Saunders and the everyday rhapsodies of Raymond Carver ... Woodward is actually at his best when he's knee-deep in the ordinary

Gerard is the author of an acclaimed sequence of novels, August (shortlisted for the 2001 Whitbread First Novel Award), I'll Go to Bed at Noon (shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize) and A Curious Earth. He was born in London in 1961, and published several prize-winning collections of poetry before turning to fiction. His latest collection of poetry, We Were Pedestrians was shortlisted for the 2005 T.S.Eliot Prize. He is Lecturer in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and lives in Bath with his family.

The quotidian and the surreal inhabit the same vivid and perplexing world in this collection of stories. Full of his trademark mixture of humour, pathos, disappointed families and dysfunctional lives, they include an ostracised small-town puppeteer, a commuter who fails to recognise his ex-wife, a bereaved academic working in the college kitchens after his part in a sex scandal and a family who wake up to find their caravan has been mysteriously transported overnight...

A Curious Earth

A wonderfully warm, compassionate and poignant look at old age, new loves and family life by the Booker Prize shortlisted author and poet.

Every now and then, you come across a book that is so intensely satisfying you want to buy a sack-load of copies and dole them out to strangers on the street, A Curious Earth is one....if only there were more writers of his calibre at work in Britain today

Though Woodward writes of family tragedy, his canvas is so busy with artfully drawn characters, telling incidents and the beautifully delineated ebb and flow of domestic life that the experience of reading him is richly involving, poignantly comic, and even somehow uplifting... his trilogy is a wonderful achievement

This immediately convincing and captivating novel is full of wit and humour and joy

A masterful portrait of old age and loneliness. I cannot praise it highly enough. If you haven't read the previous books, no matter - you will

Woodward wears his influences lightly, and tells this strange story about living and dying in a voice as beautiful and bright as it is learned

There are some wonderful set pieces, some needle sharp observations... and some delightful comic moments

If this exquisitely written, funny, touching finale doesn't actually win something, then there's no justice

Woodward's novels rise far above the ordinary. His characters are wonderfully complex and rich

It is Woodward's special ability to extract even from these grim beginnings some grounds for hope, and , indeed, some comic potential

Above all an unsentimental tribute to family

Woodward wonderfully depicts the ignominies of old age and bereavement

Quite brilliant ... the writing is scintillatingly good at times, working up to vivid and hilarious scenes ... a book that alerts you to the whole beautiful absurdity of life

Gerard Woodward was born in London in 1961. After studying painting and anthropology, he published three prize-winning collections of poetry and then turned to novel writing with an ambitious trilogy of novels based on the lives of his parents. The first, August, was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award, the second, I'll Go To Bed At Noon was on the shortlist of the 2004 Man Booker Prize and the third, A Curious Earth, was met with critical acclaim. Since then he has published another collection of poetry, We Were Pedestrians (shortlisted for the 2005 T.S. Eliot Prize) and begun teaching Creative Writing at Bath Spa University in Bath, where he now lives.

By the author of Booker-shortlisted I'll Go To Bed At Noon. 
 
Aldous Jones is in a bad way: his dilapidated house is empty of family but full of hoarded odds and ends that remind him of his dead wife and son. A preference for whisky over washing rapidly leads to his hospitalisation but it also reawakens his desire for sex and adventure and his lifelong passion for art. 
 
What follows is a heartbreakingly funny quest that will lead him first to the National Gallery, where he is bewitched by a Rembrandt painting, and then to Ostend, to stay with his boemian son and a ridiculous Dutch sexologist and then through a series of somewhat misguided relationships with sympathetic women to an ending of devatating poignancy...

I'll Go To Bed At Noon

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2004.

The narrative is mind-bogglingly crisp, resourceful and sometimes hilarious in its description of the myriad ways in which people drink... This is both a moral and a literary book... Remarkable

This is a novel where the characters seem like friends and family. It's a fine achievement

The funniest sad book you'll read all year

A painfully funny, beautifully written account of a wayward family falling like dominoes to the demon drink

Far above the ordinary. Woodward's characters are wonderfully complex and rich

Gerard Woodward was born in London in 1961. After studying painting and anthropology, he published three prize-winning collections of poetry: Householder, After the Deafening and Island to Island. His first novel August, was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award. He lives in Manchester.

It is 1970 in the suburbs of north London and, from the untidy comfort of her crowded house, Colette Jones is watching her older brother go to pieces, drinking himself into oblivion on home-made wine. Colette knows the solace a drink can provide, being partial to an evening at the Red Lion herself. But soon she finds she cannot afford to ignore the destructive effect that alcohol is having on her family, and with gritted teeth Colette is forced to exile the alcoholic son she loves so much from the house. But this act takes its toll and, just as she can't resist a drink, so she can't resist allowing Janus back into her life - with heartbreaking consequences for everyone. 
 
Gerard Woodward's magnificent second novel continues the story of the Joneses, so memorably introduced in August. By way of an odyssey through the pubs, parks and shopping parades of suburban London, it lurches from farce to tragedy as the members of one unforgettable family build and destroy their lives.

August

A stunning and unforgettable first novel from an award-winning poet.

A striking and impressive work...one of the most original novels of  the year

Simply one of the finest books about the pains and joys of family that I have ever read. The life of the Jones family glows like a barley-sugar window

A brilliantly written first novel... Spirit of time and place is lovingly remembered, steeped in nostalgia yet never sentimental... This is a novelist at work, glorifying in the old-fashioned virtues of plot and character...rendered in graceful prose that is beguiling and charming

Full of enjoyably acute social observation, August offers an absorbing account of a now vanished era of English life... Beguiling

Gerard Woodward's first novel is founded on the brilliantly simple premise of portraying a family and its inexorable implosion through a succession of August camping holidays... A strong narrative, powered by cunningly withheld information and the threat of crisis

Ever since Aldous Jones careened over the handlebars of his bicycle in 1955 and landed next to Farmer Evans's first field, it has become a tradition for him to take his family camping in Wales. Aldous has started to feel that a certain symbiosis has developed between their North London home and the Welsh village that they only ever see in August. As the years pass, Aldous's family idyll starts to disintegrate and the farm becomes a place drenched in memory.

Gerard Woodward

With the publication of his first book, HOUSEHOLDER, Gerard Woodward emerged as one of the most talented and unusual new poets of the 1990s. In his forthcoming collection AFTER THE DEAFENING, Woodward's powerful imagination, and the details of everyday life take on an extraordinary and exotic significance. 'A kind of punk anthropologist, his unsettling imagination violates all the thresholds between inner and outer. ' LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS 'Vivid and rarely whimsical' OBSERVER 'There are enough poems in this collection which are both felt AND written to justify Woodward's claim on our attention. Where he exhibits emotional generosity, he is very good indeed. ' Carol Ann Duffy

Gerard Woodward

After The Deafening

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