The Field of the Cloth of Gold (21 page)
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Authors: Magnus Mills
Also available by Magnus Mills
The Maintenance of Headway
‘Whereas you can wait ages for a bus and three arrive at once, there could be some delay before such an original work of fiction comes along again’
Sunday Times
‘Mills is a true original in a world of clones. His sparsely written books somehow manage to make the everyday deeply bizarre, occasionally menacing and often funny’
The Times
Enter the weird world of the bus driver, a strange but all too familiar universe in which ‘the timetable’ and ‘the maintenance of headway’ are sacred, but where the routes can change with the click of an inspector’s fingers. This brilliant short novel is a gently absurd examination of the British bus system and its peculiarities, where the demands of the hapless passengers are virtually ignored and where it is fine to be a little bit late but utterly unforgivable to be a moment early.
‘An excellent, funny [and] intelligent book’
Daily Telegraph
‘Delightful ... This novel should be required reading for those in charge of our chaotic public transport system’
Daily Mail
The Restraint of Beasts
‘A comedy which is as black as a pint of Guinness and as dry as a salted peanut’
Mail on Sunday
‘A heaving cauldron of black humour … You’ll never look at a stretch of high-tensile agricultural fencing in quite the same way ever again’
Time Out
Fencers Tam, Richie and their ever-exasperated English foreman are forced to move from rural Scotland to England for work. After a disastrous start involving a botched fence and an accidental murder, the three move to a damp caravan and soon find themselves in direct competition with the sinister Hall Brothers whose business enterprises seem to combine fencing, butchering and sausage-making.
‘Extremely unusual, finely crafted and funny’
Observer
‘A demented, deadpan-comic wonder’ Thomas Pynchon
All Quiet on the Orient Express
‘Hilariously surreal. It’s a bit like the Coen Brothers directing an Alan Bennett play… Fantastic’
Daily Mirror
‘Mills is genuinely unique, but if he is to be placed anywhere in the jigsaw of literary history, he will have to slot between Albert Camus and Enid Blyton. [He is] one of the handful of British writers to work in a unique fictional universe’
Independent on Sunday
It is the end of the summer. The tourists have already gone, and now the sun is abandoning the Lake District’s damp valleys. Only a lone camper remains, enjoying the quiet. He plans to stay just long enough to prepare for a trip to the East. But then the owner of the campsite asks him to paint a fence and he innocently obliges. Soon other odd jobs pile up until little by little he becomes ensnared in the ominous ‘out-of-season’.
‘Understatedly surreal, deadpan gothic, Mills is a master of the uncanny’
Esquire
‘Mills is a master of the cliffhanger and can make even the most deadpan behaviour compelling and funny… A deliciously sly comic fable’
Financial Times
The Scheme for Full Employment
‘A unique talent … Mills’s novels are among the best and most original in recent English fiction’
Literary Review
‘Mills’ odd but wonderful books combine the language of a children’s story and the strange dry humour of Harold Pinter’
Daily Express
The Scheme was designed to provide an honest wage for an honest day’s labour. Men driving identical, rust-resistant Univans deliver Univan parts to strategically spaced warehouses. Simple, self-perpetuating and efficient, it seems destined to last forever. But when some drivers begin leaving early and developing delivery sidelines, the workforce is divided into two camps: Flat-Dayers and Early Swervers.
‘A British writer to be treasured’
Independent on Sunday
‘An enjoyable novel by a truly original writer’
Sunday Times
Three to See the King
‘Magnus Mills is a genius’
Big Issue
‘Marvellous … a delicious ambiguity, a parable which is both loaded and ingenious’
Independent
Living on a windy plain in a house made entirely from tin, a recluse’s quiet life is transformed by the severely critical Mary Petrie who arrives unannounced with a trunk of her belongings in tow. As a procession of new houseguests begins, our narrator is put under pressure as his previously-isolated existence is turned on its head and he is forced to choose between a solitary life and joining the mass exodus of his neighbours…
‘Pythonesque … Quirky, deadpan and quietly unhinged’
Scotsman
‘Magnus Mills goes from strength to strength…
Three to See the King
develops his idiosyncratic vision with wry intelligence and wit’
Spectator
Screwtop Thompson
‘As the collection progresses, its humour evolves from a restrained arched eyebrow to a warm guffaw’
Sunday Times
A guest stays at an eerie guesthouse over Christmas without encountering any other residents, despite constant reassurance from the landlord that he would see them if only he arrived for breakfast slightly earlier; a man arrives home to find the family house under siege, with his mother armed, dangerous and firing at the police with a shotgun; rivalry between three cousins over a faulty toy gets out of hand as the cousins unwittingly imitate the toy they’re fighting over…
Eleven stories transport the reader into the strangely familiar and utterly surreal world of Magnus Mills and confirm him as one of the best comic writers of our time.
‘Mills’s fictional universe is entirely unlike anyone else’s going ... Brilliant!’
Dazed & Confused
‘These eleven vignettes are perfectly distilled to their deadpan essences … they’ll stay with you longer than many books ten times the size’
Metro
A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In
‘The wonderful thing about the outlandish world of Magnus Mills is that it always sounds familiar’
Guardian
‘Quirky, curious and very funny – a Magnus opus from the master of idiosyncratic peculiarity’ Ben Schott
Far away, in the ancient Empire of Greater Fallowfields, things are falling apart. The imperial orchestra is presided over by a conductor who has never played a note, the clocks are changed constantly to ensure that the cabinet can take tea in the library as the sun sets, the Astronomer Royal is only able to use the imperial telescope when he can find a sixpence to put in its slot, and everyone lives on tick. But while the kingdom drifts, awaiting the return of the absentee emperor, a ‘cruel bird’ is getting closer.
‘A beautiful, singular book: funny and acutely observed’
Independent on Sunday
‘An enchantingly Kafkaesque/philosophical fairy tale … a noel of considerable depth and intellect’
Sunday Times
www.bloomsbury.com/magnusmills
Novels
The Restraint of Beasts
All Quiet on the Orient Express
The Scheme for Full Employment
Three to See the King
Explorers of the New Century
The Maintenance of Headway
A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In
Stories
Once in a Blue Moon
Only When the Sun Shines Brightly
Screwtop Thompson and Other Tales
Bloomsbury Publishing
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway
London New York
WC1B 3DP NY 10018
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BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published in Great Britain 2015
This electronic edition published 2015
© Magnus Mills, 2015
Magnus Mills has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination
and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise
make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means
(including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying,
printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the
publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from
action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4088-6002-1
PB: 978-1-4088-6004-5
ePub: 978-1-4088-6003-8
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