By George

By George is the utterly original story of a flawed but formidable family - and of two very different boys. One is an eleven-year-old schoolboy, the other a ventriloquist's dummy. With no voice of his own but plenty to say, the dummy tells his life story; from his humble beginnings in the 1930s to his rise in fame as force's favourite during the war and the horrible secret he's been made to keep. 
 
Years later, his self-possessed but vulnerable namesake finds himself packed off to boarding school, far from his mother Frankie, dynamic actress and Principal Boy; his grandma Queenie, children's party entertainer extraordinaire; and his bed-ridden but redoubtable great-grandmother. 
 
While the dummy lies dusty, silent and forgotten, his young counterpart sets out to learn about his dead grandfather's past as a world-famous ventriloquist, his magical powers and their family's curious history.

The secrets and lies of four generations of a family of entertainers: as told by two boys named George Fisher: one flesh, one wood.

[Stace] has a startling imaginative talent and an anarchic sense of humour, but, crucially, he has an ability to bind good ideas to an absorbing plot

An absorbing tale with an original narrative twist

More than a high flown yarn; it is also a well-nigh effortless portrait of alienation and sublimated affection... brimming with imagination, Wesley Stace has created as many scenes and characters as some writers would bring to a couple of novels

An ingenious novel, full of affection for a vanished world

Stace... has fashioned a hugely funny and immensely likeable novel that evokes a flamboyantly matriarchal world of greasepaint and spangles as vividly as it captures the relentless machismo of sodden playing fields and tuck-boxes

A finely narrated and curiously moving tale

Wesley Stace is the author of two critically acclaimed novels, the international bestseller Misfortune (2005) and By George (2007). Stace is also a musician who, under the name John Wesley Harding, has released 15 albums ranging from traditional folk to pop music. The Los Angeles Times hailed his most recent pop release, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, as 'Bookshop Rock like no other... expertly tweaking the lyricist's game at every turn' while the Wall Street Journal praised the album's 'lyrics that dazzle without condescending'.

Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer

The night before brilliant but erratic composer Charles Jessold's opera - about a betrayed husband who murders his wife and her lover - is due to open, Jessold is found dead, having apparently murdered his wife and her lover. 
 
Leslie Shepherd, music critic and Jessold's collaborator on the opera, reflects on the scandalous affair in a dazzling, passionate and witty novel about the dangerous relationship between artist and critic.

A brilliant, witty thriller set in the world of English classical music in the early years of the twentieth century.

Wesley Stace is a brilliant and intensely original writer and this is his most unusual book yet

We might have predicted that Wesley Stace - a fine novelist and a fine musician - would one day write a novel about music, but could we have predicted that it would be so brilliant? The dialogue sparkles, the prose glimmers, and for once you leave a novel not just haunted by the characters and the story, but humming the tunes. A delightful Opus 3

A tremendously imaginative novel... beneath its sparkling surface there are some very murky depths. A wonderfully disquieting read

Nothing in recent fiction prepared me for the power and the polish of this subtle tale of English music in the making, a chiller wrapped in an enigma

His handling of dry comic dialogue and cynical affectation is reminiscent of P. G. Wodehouse... an intelligent, fun and thoughful piece of fiction

As quick-witted and clever as its predecessors... An entertainment of unusual class and penetration. And the tunes are great

The whodunit is a mere pretext for witty debate

Subtle, funny and chilling, this delicious novel of music and murder unfolds among composers and critics of the 1910s and 1920s. Stace plays his deadly variations with real brio in a richly entertaining performance

A baroque intellectual thriller, wittily erudite and psychologically acute. Jessold joins Thomas Mann's Adrian Leverkühn and Randall Jarrell's Gottfried Rosenbaum in the gallery of memorable composers in fiction

Wesley Stace is the author of two critically acclaimed novels, the international bestseller Misfortune (2005) and By George (2007). Stace is also a musician who, under the name John Wesley Harding, has released 15 albums ranging from traditional folk to pop music. The Los Angeles Times hailed his most recent pop release, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, as "Bookshop Rock like no other... expertly tweaking the lyricist's game at every turn" while the Wall Street Journal praised the album's "lyrics that dazzle without condescending."

Wesley Stace

Lord Loveall, heretofore heirless lord of the sprawling Love Hall, is the richest man in England. He arrives home one morning with a most unusual package - a baby that he presents as the inheritor to the family name and fortune. In honor of his beloved sister, who died young, Loveall names the baby Rose. The household, relieved at the continuation of the Loveall line, ignores the fact that this Rose has a thorn...that she is, in fact, a boy. 
 
Rose grows up with the two servant children who are her only friends, blissfully unaware of her own gender, casually hitting boundaries at Love Hall's yearly cricket game and learning to shave even as she continues to wear more and more elaborate dresses. Until, of course, the fateful day when Rose's world comes crashing down around her, and she is banished from Love Hall as an impostor by those who would claim her place as heir.

Wesley Stace

Misfortune

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