Pillow Man

An odd romance that begins among the Egyptian cotton sheets and goosedown pillows of an Oxford Street department store

Full of melancholy wit, it’s sure to beguile fans of Nick Hornby.

A quirky, well-written romance cum mystery tale.

Coleman imbues his writing with a dry wit that enlivens the everyday, and with pithy character descriptions.

Sharp, witty and beautifully written, it only takes moments to fall head first into the beautiful style of Pillow Man.

A raw account of the male emotional landscape.

Nick Coleman has a wonderful feel for the sights, sounds and stenches of modern London, and an extraordinary talent for making prosaic things poetic.

A tender, thoughtful first novel about love, death - and the appeal of fresh, crisp Egyptian cotton bed sheets.

Nick Coleman makes his fiction debut with an enjoyably offbeat romance set in modern London

It's a beautifully written, thoroughly modern and witty exploration of love, relationships and getting older, with no sign of cheesiness or sentimentality.

Following a brief spell as a stringer at NME in the mid-1980s, Nick Coleman was Music Editor of Time Out for seven years, then Arts and Features Editor at the Independent and the Independent on Sunday. He has also written on music for The Times, Guardian, Telegraph, New Statesman, Intelligent Life, GQ and The Wire. He is the author of The Train in the Night, which was shortlisted for the 2012 Wellcome Book Prize.

William has a good, steady job in retail. He works in the bedlinen department of an Oxford Street store. He knows everything there is to know about comfy. 
 
Lucy has a portfolio career which, in her view, is no kind of career at all. Her life is a mess, her love life even more unsatisfactory than that. She wouldn’t be comfortable if she sat on a sofa in Heal’s. Unable to sleep, she thinks a new pillow might be the answer. 
 
William and Lucy are not connected. Yet the pair of them share a terrible memory from the past, the sort of joint recollection that changes with the light, depending on who you were and where you were standing at the time. 
 
The question is: what to do with it? 
 
Pillow Man is a London novel of our uneasy times. It has love in it and darkness. It sets lonely tunes to a broken backbeat. It marries life to death. Crucially, it explores the difficult metaphysics of bedtime. 
 
What, after all, do we really mean by ‘thread-count’?

A Story of Music and Loss

The Train in the Night

Shortlisted for the 2012 Wellcome Trust Book Prize. A profoundly moving account of one man's struggle to recover from the loss of his greatest passion in life - and a hymn to music.

This is a book for anyone who grew up with pop music, listens to it still and has spent too much time thinking about it and talking about it. But it’s also a book about love and loss and middle age and looming mortality, written with grace and the driest imaginable humour. I’m not sure I can recommend it highly enough

A deft and heartfelt exploration of music, silence, adolescence, English pop and the emotional consequences of serious illness, and above all a discussion of something modern culture has very nearly lost touch with - the idea, and the desirability, of taste.

In a story told with warmth, wit, candour and dry, self-deprecating humour and without a whiff of self-pity... Coleman is insightful and convincing in his musings on music's emotional impact, funny in his recollections of the pains of growing up and sharp in his analysis of the thorny issue of musical 'taste'

Coleman is a spirited person, who writes with an irresistible Hornby-esque skip in his style... funny and admirable

A beautiful, elegiac ballad. Coleman writes elegantly and movingly of his youth, of growing up and of his intimate relationship with an art form that has shaped his memories

A rites-of-passage memoir refracted through key sonic experiences...a de profundis roar of anger and bafflement as the randomness of what has befallen Coleman prompts fundamental questions: Who am I? How am I? What the hell happens now?

A smart, witty and gentle memoir of music and adolescence and beyond

Fascinating book... It’s beautifully written, moving and, coming from 1970s, Yes-loving prog-rocker, surprisingly moving.

Congratulations to Coleman: his private hell is now a tribute to the things he loves the most

Really a story about listening and love. Brilliant.

If The Train in the Night went no further than the list of life-changing music that drops in at the end, like an index, it would be just another retread of High Fidelity, but Nick Hornby's book is a boy's train-set in comparison to this

An autobiography through sound...a broad meditation on mortality and the resourceful defences of memory

Emotional and resonant… Sharp, funny and sad in equal measure

Written with the same passion and wit that punctuated his reviews for the likes of NME, Coleman shares his journey to reconnecting with the soundtrack of his life

I can’t tell you how good it is but I’ll try… It’s a superb analysis

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2012 WELLCOME TRUST BOOK PRIZE 
 
How do you lose music? Then having lost it, what do you do next? Nick Coleman found out the morning he woke up to a world changed forever by Sudden Neursosensory Hearing Loss. 
 
The Train in the Night is an account of one man's struggle to recover from the loss of his greatest passion - and go one further than that: to restore his ability not only to hear but to think about and feel music, by going back to the series of big bangs which kicked off his musical universe. 
 
The result a memoir not quite like any other. It is about growing up, about taste and love and suffering and delusion and longing to be Keith Richards. It is funny, heartbreaking and, above all, true.

Nick Coleman

Voices isn’t just illuminating and thought-provoking and clever; it is exciting.

A brilliant book about singing… I have been talking to Nick Coleman about music, in person and in my head, for forty years now. [With Voices] you have the opportunity to hear what I have heard. I hope you take it

A deeply personal hymn, aria, sea shanty and saloon bar serenade… Voices is not merely an elegantly written study of a parade of fabled artists, but a long, heartfelt song of gratitude. It’s well worth hearing.

Unusual and affecting… An elegant, controlled writer whose curiosity is as engaging as his whooping passion.

Exhilarating… Coleman hears better and more clearly with half an ear than the rest of us do in a lifetime with two.

Not just a gallery of pen portraits of [Nick Coleman's] favourite singers but an impassioned examination of why certain voices ‘speak’ to us… Like the best music criticism of yore, [Voices] tangentially covers the history of popular music… He’s enjoyably sniffy about Jagger; insightful on Joni… but mostly Voices believes in magic.

[Voices] will have you delving into your music collection with fresh thanks and renewed appreciation.

Fans of all genres can dip in for thoughts on nearly everyone in the rock canon.

[Coleman] hears, listens, better with a quarter of an ear than most of us do with both. He has the knack of summing up a singer with an epigram that makes the listener thrill in agreement

How a Great Singer Can Change Your Life

***ONE OF BILLBOARD'S TOP TEN MUSIC BOOKS OF 2018*** 
 
‘A brilliant book about singing… I have been talking to Nick Coleman about music, in person and in my head, for forty years now. [With Voices] you have the opportunity to hear what I have heard. I hope you take it’ Nick Hornby in The Believer 
 
What happens when we fall in love with a voice; the siren call of someone singing? 
 
 The history of post-war popular music is traditionally told sociologically or in terms of musicological influence and innovation in style. Voices takes a different tack. In ten discrete but cohering essays Coleman tackles the arc of that history as if it were an emotional experience with real psychological consequences – as chaotic, random, challenging and unpredictable as life itself. 
 
 Voices is the story of what it is to listen and learn. Above all, it is a story of what it means to feel.

Nick Coleman

Praise for Voices

Voices isn’t just illuminating and thought-provoking and clever; it is exciting.

A brilliant book about singing… **I have been talking to Nick Coleman about music, in person and in my head, for forty years now. [With Voices] you have the opportunity to hear what I have heard. I ho ...**

A deeply personal hymn, aria, sea shanty and saloon bar serenade… Voices is not merely an elegantly written study of a parade of fabled artists, but a long, heartfelt song of gratitude. I ...

Voices isn’t just illuminating and thought-provoking and clever; it is exciting.

A brilliant book about singing… **I have been talking to Nick Coleman about music, in person and in my head, for forty years now. [With Voices] you have the opportunity to hear what I have heard. I ho ...**

A deeply personal hymn, aria, sea shanty and saloon bar serenade… Voices is not merely an elegantly written study of a parade of fabled artists, but a long, heartfelt song of gratitude. I ...

Voices isn’t just illuminating and thought-provoking and clever; it is exciting.

A brilliant book about singing… **I have been talking to Nick Coleman about music, in person and in my head, for forty years now. [With Voices] you have the opportunity to hear what I have heard. I ho ...**

A deeply personal hymn, aria, sea shanty and saloon bar serenade… Voices is not merely an elegantly written study of a parade of fabled artists, but a long, heartfelt song of gratitude. I ...

Books by Nick Coleman

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Praise for Voices

Voices isn’t just illuminating and thought-provoking and clever; it is exciting.

A brilliant book about singing… I have been talking to Nick Coleman about music, in person and in my head, for forty years now. [With Voices] you have the opportunity to hear what I have heard. I ho ...

A deeply personal hymn, aria, sea shanty and saloon bar serenade… Voices is not merely an elegantly written study of a parade of fabled artists, but a long, heartfelt song of gratitude. I ...

Voices isn’t just illuminating and thought-provoking and clever; it is exciting.

A brilliant book about singing… I have been talking to Nick Coleman about music, in person and in my head, for forty years now. [With Voices] you have the opportunity to hear what I have heard. I ho ...

A deeply personal hymn, aria, sea shanty and saloon bar serenade… Voices is not merely an elegantly written study of a parade of fabled artists, but a long, heartfelt song of gratitude. I ...

Voices isn’t just illuminating and thought-provoking and clever; it is exciting.

A brilliant book about singing… I have been talking to Nick Coleman about music, in person and in my head, for forty years now. [With Voices] you have the opportunity to hear what I have heard. I ho ...

A deeply personal hymn, aria, sea shanty and saloon bar serenade… Voices is not merely an elegantly written study of a parade of fabled artists, but a long, heartfelt song of gratitude. I ...

Books by Nick Coleman

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter

A brilliant book about singing… **I have been talking to Nick Coleman about music, in person and in my head, for forty years now. [With Voices] you have the opportunity to hear what I have heard. I ho ...**

A brilliant book about singing… **I have been talking to Nick Coleman about music, in person and in my head, for forty years now. [With Voices] you have the opportunity to hear what I have heard. I ho ...**

A brilliant book about singing… **I have been talking to Nick Coleman about music, in person and in my head, for forty years now. [With Voices] you have the opportunity to hear what I have heard. I ho ...**