Justin Cartwright

Oxford is many things. But it has a symbolic meaning well beyond its buildings, gardens, rituals and teaching. It stands for something deep in the Anglo-Saxon mind - excellence, a charmed life, a respect for tradition. Author Justin Cartwright re-explores his old university town - revealing new and beautiful insights to this historic city.

A stunning new novel from the author of The Promise of Happiness On 20 July 1944, Adolf Hitler narrowly escaped an assassin's bomb. Axel von Gottberg and his conspirators were hunted down and hanged from meat-hooks, and the executions filmed. Sixty years later, Conrad Senior is left a legacy of papers by von Gottberg's close friend, the legendary Oxford professor Elya Mendel, and becomes obsessed with what they reveal and finding the brutal film. Award-winning writer Justin Cartwright has conjured a masterwork that addresses the nature of friendship and what it means to be human, and it is a remarkable tapestry of passion, ideas, frailty and courage.

From award-winner Justin Cartwright, a classic and stunning novel of English life and family love Charles Judd meanders round his local Cornish beach, contemplating the turns his life has taken. His wife Daphne struggles hopelessly with the latest fish recipe, trying to keep something in her life under control. Two of their children are keeping it all together – just. But they are all still recovering from the shock of the prodigal daughter, Juliet, being imprisoned in New York State for her part in an art theft. Since then, Charles appears to have lost his entire family. Now Juliet is being released, the family is about to be reunited and the wounds her imprisonment has caused are being re-opened.

284 p. ; 18 cm

"In this novel a London-based businessman, Dan Silas, surprises his thoroughly English self when he decides to attend this thirty-year high school class reunion. He has not, after all, in the past three decades had any inclination whatever to return to the school or the small Michigan town he happily left behind him in 1968.". "Dan finds himself neither immune to a rampant case of culture shock on his arrival in pastoral Hollybush nor in any way prepared for the faces he meets - particularly when he discovers that his old friend Gary Beaner has assumed the Ojibwa blanket and identity of Pale Eagle, a Shawnee who died in the disastrous 1813 Battle of Detroit, and that Gloria Swarthout, formerly a cheerleader and his high school sweetheart, is claiming Dan fathered her daughter. Dan doesn't meet his alleged daughter; she's been murdered by a serial killer." "Leading the Cheers explores the youthful dreams and unforeseen realities of its compassionately drawn characters at the same time that it lays bare the troubled soul of contemporary America."--BOOK JACKET.

A scattered family is thrown back together after the eldest child is released from prison after serving her sentence for art theft.

Frank McAllister has become wealthy in England, where he has lived for thirty years. He has a house in Notting Hill, a house in the New Forest, and a house near Cape Town. But more and more he feels alienated in England. As the book opens, he is preparing to go to South Africa with his lover, Nellie. He is also waiting anxiously for his daughter, Lucinda, to arrive from California, where she has been in rehab. Frank is a descendant of the Boer leader, Piet Retief, who was murdered by the Zulu king Dingane, along with all his followers, in 1838. He has been an icon of Afrikaners ever since. Frank's Afrikaner cousin, Jaco, has become moderately famous on YouTube for having faced down a huge white shark. He is now in America, where he has joined the Scientologists. His chaotic and violent life spills over on to Frank. He is drawn into a world of violence and delusion that is to threaten the family. Justin Cartwright possesses that rarest of novelist's skills - the ability to create fiction which is intensely serious but which also vividly encompasses the absurdity and comedy of life. 'Up against the night' is a subtle, brilliant novel about South Africa, its beautiful, superbly evoked landscape, its violent past and its uncertain present. Justin Cartwright is a descendant of Piet Retief.

Richie Cathar was named after his father's hero, Richard the Lionheart. His father, Alaric, believed that Richard and Robin Hood had met and found a document which was to prove this. In his father's footsteps, Richie travels to Jerusalem where he falls in love with an journalist who is kidnapped in Cairo. In the course of writing about the Crusades, Richie discovers that the True Cross, lost to Saladin in 1187, was recovered by a small band of Richard's knights. He embarks on a quest of his own to find the True Cross - and to discover whether or not everything in his father's mind was a fantasy.

An Oxford student inherits his professor's papers regarding the Jewish man's friendship with a German who was killed as an assassin after the attempt to kill Hitler in 1944.

305 p. ; 22 cm