Criminals, drifters, beggars, the homeless, immigrants, prostitutes, tramping artisans, street entertainers, abandoned children, navvies, and families fallen on hard times – a whole underclass of people on the margins of society passed through Victorian l

The debut novel from Joseph O'Neill, author of the Man Booker Prize longlisted and Richard & Judy pick, 'Netherland'. James Jones is slipping steadily through life. He has a steady job as a junior partner at a solicitor's firm, a steady girlfriend and a steady mortgage. Nothing much is happening in Jones's life but he really doesn't mind – this is exactly the way he likes it. Michael Donovan, meanwhile, is a star – a world-class international lawyer and advocate – he's everything Jones wanted to be and isn't. Jones was once Donovan's pupil and, for a while, it looked like he too would make his name – but he left that high-powered world behind a long time ago, or so he thought. One day Jones reads in the paper that Donovan has collapsed in court – then, out of the blue, Donovan contacts him; he has a job he needs Jones to work on... Joseph O'Neill's debut is wonderfully clever and comic novel – about ambitions and aspirations and the realities that they inevitably collide with.

A brilliant and darkly comic novel from the Man Booker Prize longlisted author of 'Netherland'. Fourteen years ago Mary Breeze was killed by lightning – it should have been all the bad luck that the Breeze family were due but, as John Breeze is about to find out, this couldn't be further from the truth. 'The Breezes' is John Breeze's account of his family's most hellish fortnight – when insurance policies, security systems and lucky underpants are pitted against redundancy, burglary and relegation – and lose. John (a failing chair-maker) and his father (railway manager and rubbish football referee) are only feebly equipped with shaky religious notions, management maxims and cynical postures as they try to come to terms with the absurd unfairness of lightning striking twice… From the conflict between blind optimism and cynicism, to the urge to pretend that things just aren't happening, 'The Breezes' is wonderfully clever and comic novel about desperately trying to cope with the...

A masterful collection of eleven stories about the way we live now from the best-selling author of Netherland.From bourgeois facial hair trends to parental sleep deprivation, O'Neill closely observes the mores of his characters, whose vacillations and second thoughts expose the mysterious pettiness, the underlying violence and, sometimes, the surprising beauty of ordinary life in the early twenty-first century. A lonely wedding guest talks to a goose; a pair of poets struggle over whether to participate in a "pardon Edward Snowden" verse petition; a cowardly husband lets his wife face a possible intruder in their home; a co-op renter in New York City can't find anyone to give him a character reference. On the surface, these men and women may only be in mild trouble, but O'Neill reminds us of the real, secretly political consequences of our internal monologues in these perfectly made, fiercely modern stories. No writer is more incisive about the strange world we...

The author of the best-selling and award-winning Netherland now gives us his eagerly awaited, stunningly different new novel: a tale of alienation and heartbreak in Dubai.Distraught by a breakup with his long-term girlfriend, the hero of this novel leaves New York to take an unusual job in a strange desert metropolis. In a Dubai at the height of its self-invention as a futuristic Shangri-La, our protagonist struggles with his new position as the "family officer" of the capricious and very rich Batros family. And he struggles, even more helplessly, with the "doghouse," a seemingly inescapable condition of culpability in which he feels himself constantly trapped--even if he's just going to the bathroom, or reading e-mail, or scuba diving. A comic and philosophically profound exploration of what has become of humankind's moral progress, The Dog is told with Joseph O'Neill's hallmark eloquence, empathy, and storytelling mastery. It is a brilliantly...