Bryan Stanley Johnson

A sports journalist, sent to a Midlands town on a weekly assignment, finds himself confronted by ghosts from the past when he disembarks at the railway station. Memories of one of his best, most trusted friends, a tragically young victim of cancer, begin to flood through his mind as he attempts to go about the routine business of reporting a football match. B S Johnson's famous 'book in a box', in which the chapters are presented unbound, to be read in any order the reader chooses, is one of the key works of a novelist now undergoing an enormous revival of interest. The Unfortunates is a book of passionate honesty and dark, courageous humour: a meditation on death and a celebration of friendship which also offers a remarkably frank self-portrait of its author.

The Unfortunates

Christie Malry is a simple person. Born into a family without money, he realized early on that the best way to come by money was to be near it. So he took a job as a junior clerk in a stuffy bank. Here he learned the principles of double-entry bookkeeping, from which evolved his Great Idea.

Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry

A failed love affair, the failure to find work as an architect, and the difficulties of substitute teaching cause Albert Angelo to reexamine his life

Albert Angelo

The perfect introduction to the man Samuel Beckett called 'a most gifted writer'. Reissued for the first time in many years, and for the first time together, this omnibus contains B.S. Johnson's most famous and critically acclaimed novels. Albert Angelo (1964) was Johnson's second novel. The eponymous Albert is an architect by training but a supply teacher through economic necessity, and as his character begins to question what he wants to achieve, Johnson attempts to reproduce the dissatisfactions and disappointments we experience as an inevitable part of life. Trawl (1966) is Johnson's convincingly authentic and harrowing attempt to describe the human condition, as seen through the eyes of the solitary passenger on board a deep-water trawler. House Mother Normal: A Geriatric Comedy (1971) is a remarkable study of old age as the same events are relayed through the eyes of eight different inmates of an old people's home.

Omnibus

See the Old Lady Decently

Christie Malry's Own Double-entry

Poems Two

Everybody Knows Somebody Who's Dead

Employing the principles of double-entry bookkeeping, a frustrated bank clerk devises a unique system for righting the wrongs imposed on him by society

Bryan Stanley Johnson

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