NICHOLAS ROYLE

Silas and Ethel Woodlock retire to spend their twilight years by thesea, only to find themselves traumatised by herring gulls. Londonjournalist Stephen Osmer writes a provocative essay about twopeople called Nicholas Royle, one a novelist, the other a literarycritic. Whether Royle, the literary critic, is having an affair withthe beautiful Lily Lynch, and has stolen and published SilasWoodlocks short story, Gulls, becomes a race to the death forat least one of the authors.Playfully commenting on the main story are 17 Hides: primarilyabout birds, ornithology and films (including Hitchcocks), theseshort texts give us a different view of the messy business of being human, the fragility of the physical world we inhabit and the nature of writing itself.Witty as well as erudite and delightful in its wordplay, An English Guide to Birdwatching explores the fertile hinterland between fact and fiction. In its focus on birds, climate change, the banking crisis, social justice and human migration, it is intensely relevant to wider political concerns; in its mischief and post-modern (or post-fiction) sensibility, it celebrates the transformative possibilities of language and the mutability of the novel itself.

Facing the disarray and disorientation around his fathers death, a man contends with the strange and haunting power of the house his parents once lived in.He sets about the mundane yet exhausting process of sorting through the remnants of his fathers life -- clearing away years of accumulated objects, unearthing forgotten memories and the haunted realms of everyday life. At the same time, he embarks on an eccentric side-project. And as he grows increasingly obsessed with this new project, his grip on reality seems to slip.Nicholas Royle challenges and experiments with literary form to forge a new mode of storytelling that is both playful and inquisitive. Tender, absorbing and at times shockingly funny, this extraordinary novel is both mystery and love story. It confronts the mad hand of grief while embracing the endless possibilities of language.

Editors Choice, The BooksellerA mix of memoir and narrative non-fiction, White Spines is a book about Nicholas Royles passion for Picadors fiction and non-fiction publishing from the 1970s to the end of the 1990s. It explores the bookshops and charity shops, the books themselves, and the way a unique collection grew and became a literary obsession. Above all a love song to books, writers and writing.

The nations favourite annual guide to the short story, now in its twelfth year.Best British Short Stories invites you to judge a book by its cover or, more accurately, by its title. This critically acclaimed series aims to reprint the best short stories published in the previous calendar year by British writers, whether based in the UK or elsewhere. The editors brief is wide ranging, covering anthologies, collections, magazines, newspapers and web sites, looking for the best of the bunch to reprint all in one volume.

A tender and graceful study of parents and children, and a finely judged and measured attempt to capture the flitting, quicksilver shapes of what we keep and what we lose: the touch, the tone, the gaze of the past as it fades. It is a moving and beautifully achieved memoir, and a testament to the writers skill and generosity of spirit. Hilary MantelBefore the devastating loss of her marbles, Mrs Royle, a nurse by profession, is a marvellously no-nonsense character, an autodidact who reads widely and voraciously, swears at her fox-hunting neighbours, and instils in the young Nick a love of literature and of wildlife that will form his character and his career.In this touching, funny and beautifully written portrait of family life, mother-son relationships and bereavement, Nicholas Royle captures the spirit of post-war parenting as well as of his mother, whose dementia and death were triggered by the tragedy of losing her other sonRoyles younger brotherto cancer in his twenties.At once poetic and philosophical, this extraordinary memoir is also a powerful reflection on climate crisis and mother nature, on literature and life writing, on human and non-human animals, and on the links between the maternal and memory itself.

The nation's favourite annual guide to the short story, now in its twelfth year.Best British Short Stories invites you to judge a book by its cover - or, more accurately, by its title. This critically acclaimed series aims to reprint the best short stories published in the previous calendar year by British writers, whether based in the UK or elsewhere. The editor's brief is wide ranging, covering anthologies, collections, magazines, newspapers and web sites, looking for the best of the bunch to reprint all in one volume.

Shadow Lines very much celebrates the world of books TelegraphNicholas Royles love of second-hand books and the inclusions he finds inside them, their presence betrayed by shadow lines, is about making connections. Someone has scribbled a number in a book? Hell text or call. An old address? Hell return the book to where it used to live. Follow him as he walks between bookshops, reading as he goes, on the hunt for treasure, for ways to make us feel closer to the books on our shelves, to each other and to our own lives.Share in Royles enthusiasm for the Rev W Awdrys Railway Series, Penguin Modern Stories and Paul Austers cult classic, The New York Trilogy, as well as books in art and film.The brilliant follow-up to the instant classic, White Spines.Praise for Shadow Lines What links Bin Ladens bodyguard to an Oxfam bookshop in London?What links Bin Ladens bodyguard to an Oxfam bookshop in London?. In Shadow Lines, Nicholas Royle tracks down the owners of objects slipped into second-hand books with amusing and surprising results. Ian Sansom The TelegraphIf you love books, bookshops and browsing, this is your perfect all-year gift head to your happy place with a copy Shadow Lines today! (Note: inclusions not supplied.)

Bennett and Royle approach their subject by way of literary works themselves (a poem by Emily Dickinson, a passage from Shakespeare, a novel by Salman Rushdie), rather than by way of abstract theoretical ideas and isms. In 32 short chapters they focus on a range of familiar-looking terms (character, the author, voice, narrative) as well as less obvious ones (laughter, pleasure, ghosts, secrets) in order to show why such literary texts are so compelling. The third edition updates and expands on earlier editions, and includes new chapters. This book avoids what is so frequently tiresome or intimidating about 'theory', offering instead an introduction that is consistently entertaining, thought provoking and surprising.

In this entertaining and provocative introduction, Royle offers lucid explanations of various key ideas, including deconstruction, undecidability, iterability, differance, aporia, the pharmakon, the supplement, a new enlightenment, and the democracy to come. He also gives attention, however, to a range of less obvious key ideas of Derrida, such as earthquakes, animals and animality, ghosts, monstrosity, the poematic, drugs, gifts, secrets, war, and mourning. Derrida is seen as an extraordinarily inventive thinker, as well as a brilliantly imaginative and often very funny writer. Other critical introductions tend to highlight the specifically philosophical nature and genealogy of his work. Royle's book proceeds in a new and different way, in particular by focusing on the crucial but strange place of literature in Derrida's writings. He thus provides an appreciation and understanding based on detailed reference to Derrida's texts, interwoven with close readings of such writers as Shakespeare, Coleridge, P.B.Shelley, Poe, Emily Brontë, Franz Kafka and Elizabeth Bowen. In doing so, he explores Derrida's consistent view that deconstruction is "a coming-to-terms with literature". He emphasizes the ways in which "literature", for Derrida, is indissociably bound up with other concerns, such as philosophy and psychoanalysis, politics and ethics, responsibility and justice, law and democracy.