‘Nobody can be a person twenty-fours hours a day – it just can’t be done. At night the sets dissolve and the performance falls away. We’re off the books.’

That’s John Cromer talking, in this fresh instalment of his lifelong saga. For John, embarking on a new stage of life in 1970s Cambridge, charm and wit aren’t just assets, they are survival skills. It may be a case of John against the world. If so, don’t be in too much of a hurry to bet on the world.

Conjuring a remarkable voice and mind, Caret is a feast of a novel, served on a succession of small plates, each portion providing an adult’s daily intake of literary nourishment. Reading it – like any encounter with John Cromer — is guaranteed to help you work, rest and play.

‘Thank god for John Cromer and his creator Adam Mars-Jones, one of the funniest, most self-aware characters in English fiction, whose minute observations on everything from constipation to lust are a source of unexpected delight.’ Linda Grant

Shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize 2016

When his widowed father – once a high court judge and always a formidable figure – drifted into vagueness if not dementia, the writer Adam Mars-Jones took responsibility for his care. Intimately trapped in the London flat where the family had always lived, the two men entered an oblique new stage in their relationship.

In the aftermath of an unlooked-for intimacy, Mars-Jones has written a book devoted to particular emotions and events. Kid Gloves is a highly entertaining book about (among other things) families, the legal profession, and the vexed question of Welsh identity. It is necessarily also a book about the writer himself – and the implausible, long-delayed moment, some years before, when he told his sexually conservative father about his own orientation, taking the homophobic bull by the horns. The supporting cast includes Ian Fleming, the Moors Murderers, Jacqueline Bisset and Gilbert O’Sullivan, the singer-songwriter whose trademark look kept long shorts from their rightful place on the fashion pages for so many years.

‘Constantly surprising.’ London Review of Books

‘One of the most original comic creations in recent fiction.’ Guardian

Time passed slowly in the 1950s, especially if you’d been put to bed and told not to move (until further notice). But John Cromer, the central character of this extraordinary novel, is much closer to being an explorer than a victim. He’s the weakest hero in fiction – unless he’s one of the strongest.

The first instalment of the semi-infinite Pilcrow sequence, this novel of capacious wit and style marks the opening chapter of the most memorable and enjoyable experiment in modern fiction.

‘Pilcrow is a humdinger, a startling work that stands out against the monotonous field of contemporary British fiction as a genuine, almost miraculous oddity.’ Metro