My Little Armalite

Set in the world that he has made his own - that of middle-class Englishmen struggling with the mortgage, low self-esteem and dreams of sash windows - this is Hawes at his sharpest and funniest.

Hawes has developed into a prolifically inventive and increasingly subtle satirist. Though the current novel features all his regular trademarks - black humour, sharp dialogue and a plot that goes off with all guns blazing in every respect - one senses that this book is also Hawes's homage to one of the great academic satires of the last century, Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man

Very witty... Both laddish and slyly intelligent, Hawes has his cake and eats it

Hawes scatters pellets of satirical wit on the twitchy paranoia of the ageing liberal

James Hawes is the author of six novels, including White Powder, Green Light and Speak for England. He lives in Cardiff.

John Goode is a leftie lecturer who just wants to give his beloved wife and kids a normal life. You know: north London, good schools, nice neighbours, sash windows... yes, you know. But who can afford that kind of normal these days? 
 
Goode can only daydream of becoming a television academic, or else of a bloody great economic crash that would make his job worth something again. So when he stumbles on a long-buried assault rifle whilst planting plum-trees for his children, he soon begins to wonder if this might be just the tool to seriously renegociate his family's future...

Speak For England

Deep in the jungle, a reality TV star stumbles across a miniature civilisation of plane crash survivors preserving a pocket of 1950s England within the wilderness. A rollicking satire about the old, the new and the English.

Amusing and intelligent throughout...The tone of the narrative is pitch-perfect

A comic novelist of considerable stature...An assured, clever, raffishly inventive work

The writing is so sharp and waspish that comparisons with Evelyn Waugh are not misplaced

Consistently inventive and entertaining

James Hawes is the author of six novels, including White Powder, Green Light and My Little Armalite. He lives in Cardiff.

Brian Marley, a divorced Englishman, is alone in the vilest jungle on earth, about to die live on television. A contestant on Brit Pluck, Green Hell, Two Million, the ultimate reality TV show, Marley has managed to outlive his rivals and win enough money to change his life. Except that the TV crew has just been wiped out in a helicopter crash. With the crocodiles closing in, he has no option but to climb the vast cliff at his back. Inevitably, he falls... 
 
...And awakes in a lost world that is remarkably like an Englishman's heaven. There's cricket and rugger, the Union Jack, plucky boys, pretty girls, a tough but fair headmaster - an entire miniature civilization preserved by the surviving passengers from Comet IV, which vanished in 1958. 
 
Firmly convinced that they were the first casualties of World War III, they have kept an idyllic, pre-sixties England alive. When Brian contacts the outside world, the Headmaster is outraged to find an embattled New Labour MP unchallenged by a hapless Tory Party. With 50s conviction, he sets about restoring the values of the Eagle to England.

White Powder, Green Light

'An amusing, garrulous satire on Soho media life' - Daily Mail

The funniest British novelist writing today

Hawes remains a weaver of taut yarns with dialogue that is smart and fast

James Hawes is the author of five novels, including A White Merc With Fins and Speak for England. He lives in Cardiff.

In Soho Paul Salmon, co-producer of the ghastly Britpack Russian Mafia caper Base Metal, is busy chasing his next project and not taking cocaine. In Pontypool, Dr Jane Feverfew is busy wooing her ludicrous students and fighting her leek-carrying ex. In Cardiff, the Welsh cultural mafia are busy planning the disposal of next year's subsidies. 
 
Jane can hardly remember what sex is like. Her only excitement in life is a coy e-flirtation @ ResistYoof.co.uk. But the net was made for liars, and the coke-fuelled Salmon mistakes Jane for a writer who might save his bacon - and warm up his bed - and Jane dives happily into the white powder desert of actors, agents and W1 clubs. 
 
As the Day of Reckoning arrives for her film and for Soho, Jane comes to her senses too late - or at least too late for salvation to come from any but the most unlikely of quarters-

Dead Long Enough

Harry MacDonald had seen plenty of skulls - arsing about with some poor sod or other's skull is what pays Harry's rent - but until the day of his official thirty-ninth birthday (actually, Harry was knocking on forty), which was also the day he met Shnade again, he had never noticed the shape of his own skull-to-be; and until the night of that same day, he had never seen a living skull being crunched deliberately, wetly inwards. Perhaps it all happened because Harry had got lost in his work for too long. Or perhaps because Shnade had got lost doing nothing for too long. Or perhaps because all of us, Harry and Shnade included, are lost full stop. She's not really Shnade, of course. Shnade was what we heard, and is what we called her, and is what she will be, to me any rate, for as long as I have. When Shnade swung round, I saw her dress flick along with the movement of her hips and brush Harry's thigh. It was a light, small, flimsy dress of reddish cotton; she wore it over some kind of black, shiny, strappy, swimsuitish thing. You could see this big tattoo of a lizard that ran right from her shoulder to her wrist. And you could tell that when her dress swished across the thigh of Harry's jeans, it felt to him like it was made of chain-mail. And I think, looking back, we all knew, right then, that Harry was fucked.

James Hawes

A very comic and brilliant book... James Hawes has adapted an enjoyable narrative poise of cynical idealism, both a loving and a loathing of modern Britain... A new novelist of prodigious talent

A White Merc With Fins is determined and surprisingly successful at transporting the aesthetic of Pulp Fiction and the caper plot of Reservoir Dogs to Shepherd's Bush... Fast, sexy, bristling with more neologisms than a Douglas Coupland novel

Fantastically well done... revitalizes his genre

Take four ne'er-do-wells: a 28-year-old ex-public schoolboy who can't bear the idea of setting down; Suzy the Black Widow, who has a deliciously flat stomach and drives like she's breathing through the carbs; Brady the Reservoir Dogs fetishist; and Chico the fat Portuguese waiter. Add some plastic guns, the IRA and a white Merc with fins and you have a plan. What plan? The plan to walk into Michael Winner's private bank and walk out with half a million quid. Fast, clever, stylish, funny and utterly compulsive, this is a first novel with everything.

James Hawes

Praise for A White Merc With Fins

Confident and sassy, brilliant

A very comic and brilliant book... James Hawes has adapted an enjoyable narrative poise of cynical idealism, both a loving and a loathing of modern Britain... A new novelist of prodigious talent

A White Merc With Fins is determined and surprisingly successful at transporting the aesthetic of Pulp Fiction and the caper plot of Reservoir Dogs to Shepherd's Bush... Fast, sexy, bristling wi ...

Confident and sassy, brilliant

A very comic and brilliant book... James Hawes has adapted an enjoyable narrative poise of cynical idealism, both a loving and a loathing of modern Britain... A new novelist of prodigious talent

A White Merc With Fins is determined and surprisingly successful at transporting the aesthetic of Pulp Fiction and the caper plot of Reservoir Dogs to Shepherd's Bush... Fast, sexy, bristling wi ...

Confident and sassy, brilliant

A very comic and brilliant book... James Hawes has adapted an enjoyable narrative poise of cynical idealism, both a loving and a loathing of modern Britain... A new novelist of prodigious talent

A White Merc With Fins is determined and surprisingly successful at transporting the aesthetic of Pulp Fiction and the caper plot of Reservoir Dogs to Shepherd's Bush... Fast, sexy, bristling wi ...

Books by James Hawes

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