A hectic and hilarious morality tale for the modern world. In Heaven, Big God's mind is crumbling, Mrs God has lost her looks, and their daughter, Clem, the Goddess of Love and Sex and Beauty, has been rejected by her lover and banished to Earth. Down in the streets of Soho, Clem searches for something new, and finds it in glamorous and self-loathing reality-TV star Natty, whose fetishistic love life with rock star Baz is about to hit the headlines. Sexy, feisty and real, it is a story about love at its dirtiest, maddest and most bittersweet. Chris Hannan's play The God of Soho was first performed at Shakespeare's Globe, London, in 2011.
From the award-winning author of Marriage of a Thousand Lies comes a brilliantly written, globe-spanning novel about identity, faith, family, and sexuality. In Tamil Nadu, India, a boy is born with blue skin. His father sets up an ashram, and the family makes a living off of the pilgrims who seek the child’s blessings and miracles, believing young Kalki to be the tenth human incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. In Kalki’s tenth year, he is confronted with three trials that will test his power and prove his divine status and, his father tells him, spread his fame worldwide. While he seems to pass them, Kalki begins to question his divinity. Over the next decade, his family unravels, and every relationship he relied on—father, mother, aunt, uncle, cousin—starts falling apart. Traveling from India to the underground rock scene of New York City, Blue-Skinned Gods explores ethnic, gender, and sexual identities, and spans continents and faiths, in an expansive and heartfelt look at the need for belief in our globally interconnected world.
‘Moon Over Soho cements [the Rivers of London] series as my favorite urban fantasy series. The humor, the world-building, the action, the magic, the mystery, the procedural—all are top-notch.’ — Ranting Dragon My name is Peter Grant, and I’m a Police Constable in that mighty army for justice known as the Metropolitan Police (a.k.a. the Filth). I’m also an apprentice wizard, the first in fifty years. When your dad is an almost famous jazz trumpeter, you know the classics. And that’s why, when Dr Walid called me down to the morgue to listen to a corpse, I recognized the tune it was playing as the jazz classic ‘Body and Soul.’ Something violently supernatural had happened to the victim, strong enough to leave its imprint on his corpse as if it were a wax cylinder recording. The former owner of the body, Cyrus Wilkinson, was a part-time jazz saxophonist and full-time accountant who had dropped dead of a heart attack just after finishing a gig. He wasn’t the first, but no one was going to let me exhume corpses just to see if they were playing my tune. So it was back to old-fashioned police legwork, starting in Soho, the heart of the scene, with the lovely Simone – Cyrus’s ex-lover, professional jazz kitten and as inviting as a Rubens portrait – as my guide. And it didn’t take me long to realise there were monsters stalking Soho, creatures feeding off that special gift that separates the great musician from someone who can raise a decent tune. What they take is beauty. What they leave behind is sickness, failure and broken lives. Reviews for Moon Over Soho Mr. Aaronovitch is, in short, writing the best contemporary occult detective series on the shelf today, and that’s by a substantial margin.’ — Pornokitsch ‘Moon Over Soho is a gripping continuation of River of London’s well executed blend of police-procedural and fantasy with a good splash of horror thrown in. This is urban fantasy done with a loving attention to detail and enlivened by an ever present wit making this series a must-read for anyone who likes their fantasy with a strong edge of realism.’ — SF Book Reviews
From a disciple of the late Chinua Achebe comes a masterful and universally acclaimed novel that is at once a taut, literary thriller and an indictment of greed’s power to subsume all things, including the sacred. Foreign Gods, Inc., tells the story of Ike, a New York-based Nigerian cab driver who sets out to steal the statue of an ancient war deity from his home village and sell it to a New York gallery. Ike's plan is fueled by desperation. Despite a degree in economics from a major American college, his strong accent has barred him from the corporate world. Forced to eke out a living as a cab driver, he is unable to manage the emotional and material needs of a temperamental African American bride and a widowed mother demanding financial support. When he turns to gambling, his mounting losses compound his woes. And so he travels back to Nigeria to steal the statue, where he has to deal with old friends, family, and a mounting conflict between those in the village who worship the deity, and those who practice Christianity. A meditation on the dreams, promises and frustrations of the immigrant life in America; the nature and impact of religious conflicts; an examination of the ways in which modern culture creates or heightens infatuation with the "exotic," including the desire to own strange objects and hanker after ineffable illusions; and an exploration of the shifting nature of memory, Foreign Gods is a brilliant work of fiction that illuminates our globally interconnected world like no other.
He wants me to fuck about with paper clips in some office with a smile on my face, fuck him . . . but there's just one thing I've got to take care of first. I've got to do something to make this right. Four years on from the collapse of the Lehman Brothers and still we find ourselves in crisis. It's time to work out what's wrong. It's time to look at the heart of the system. You Can Still Make A Killing is the story of the normal men and women who fill the City's institutions, of a world radically altered when right became wrong, and of the private worlds that fall apart when there are no alternatives in sight. This production reunites director Matthew Dunster with playwright Nicholas Pierpan, following their collaboration in 2010 on Pierpan's play The Maddening Rain (Old Red Lion and Soho Theatre). The cast includes Alecky Blythe (writer of London Road), which marks her much-anticipated return to acting, and Kellie Bright (Love and Money, Royal Exchange and Young Vic). It will run at the Southwark Playhouse in its main house (which holds 150 seats) from 10 October until 3 November 2012. A German production will open at Theatre Ulm in April, 2013.
From Fleet Street to the television, North Face of Soho is the fascinating and hilarious fourth volume of memoir from much-loved author, poet and broadcaster Clive James. '[James] delivers his gags with honed elegance' – Sunday Times It is 1968. Newly married, dressed in the style of the times ('a frenzy of bad judgement'), Clive James is leaving the cloistered world of Cambridge academia and setting his sights once again on the lights of literary London. Luckily for him and us, this crack at the big city would go rather better than last time. Still writing songs, directing sketch shows and trying to break into the movie business, with very mixed success, Clive eventually lands a weekly TV column at the Observer, finds his metier and rapidly becomes a household name. Credited with inventing a genre, Clive turns his attention to the previously critically disregarded medium of television to comment on the entire culture. Through the Seventies and early Eighties, from Fleet Street to Hollywood, from Russian department stores to Paris fashion shows, this is the hilarious, entertaining and honest story of a life lived to the full. North Face of Soho is the fourth book of memoir from Clive James. Continue his story with The Blaze of Obscurity.
In her stunning debut, Kyle produces an emotionally powerful coming-of-age story that deftly and movingly captures not only the complexity of love, loss, and human relationships but also the fierce and powerful bond between horses and humans.
