LONGLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 2014‘A symphonic poem about postwar England and Englishness … A masterpiece’ Financial TimesThe 1950s were not grey. In Jonathan Meades’s detailed, petit-point memoir they are luridly polychromatic. They were peopled by embittered grotesques, bogus majors, vicious spinsters, reckless bohos, pompous boors, drunks, suicides. Death went dogging everywhere. Salisbury had two industries: God and the Cold War. For the child, delight is to be found everywhere –...
‘One of the funniest and truest writers we have. No one understands England better than Meades.’ Stephen FryAn inventively nasty, gruesomely comic paean to the sylvan heights of Forest Hill and Upper Norwood, a warped map of the death trade’s quotidian strangeness.Henry Fowler was twice, long ago, runner-up in the Oil Fuels Guild-sponsored Young Funeral Director of the Year competition. His intense loyalties are to his parents, to his wife and children, to the family firm and the trade it...
