Quartet 0704-31113-5, 1974.
——, 2nd imp., 1976, 309pp, 75p. Cover: still from TV series
——, 3rd imp., 1976.
The brilliant, warm yet realistic chronicle of working-class life which the Evening Standard said: "Holding On would make a splendid television series. There is as much to be said of the Wheelwrights as the Forsytes—if not more..."Holding On was adapted as a TV serial by London Weekend Television starring Michael Elphick and Patricia Franklin. IMDB.
__Around an ordinary two-up, two-down house in the East End of London revolves the story of Charlie Wheelwright and his family. Charlie was born there at the turn of the century; he dies as it awaits demolition seventy years later. They are years of turmoil and change—not only for the Wheelwright family, as sons and daughters grow up, marry, move away, but also for Britain, enduring two world wars, a General Strike, the Depression and the advantages and threats of 'progress'.
About the author [1976]
Mervyn Jones, born in London in 1922, has written several novels, including John and Mary, which was made into a film, and Joseph, a novel based on the life of Stalin. He has also written four non-fiction books and is a journalist whose articles on political and social subjects have appeared mainly in the Observer, New Statesman and Tribune.
Obituaries: Daily Telegraph (24 February 2010); The Guardian (25 February 2010).
Penguin 0140-11921-3, 1989, 384pp.
——, at least 14 printings.
"The campus novel meets the industrial novel ... Lodge charts an improbable but highly entertaining relationship between Vic Wilcox (MD of Pringle's engineering firm) and Dr Robyn Penrose (temporary Lecturer in English and fully paid-up devotee of semiotic materialism) ... The result is compulsive reading"—David Profumo in the Daily Telegraph.Nice Work was a BBC Pebble Mill production in association with BBC Enterprises, produced by Chris Parr, directed by Christopher Menaul from a screenplay by David Lodge. It starred Warren Clarke as Vic Wilcox and Hadyn Gwynne as Robyn Penrose. The novel on which it was based was the winner of the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award and short-listed for the Booker Prize. IMDB.
About the author [c.1990]
Born in London in 1935, David Lodge was educated at University College, London, where he took his BA degree in 1955 and his MA in 1959. In between he did National Service in the British Army. He holds a doctorate from the University of Birmingham, where he taught in the English Department from 1960 to 1987, when he retired to become a full-time writer. He retains the title of Honorary Professor of Modern English Literature at Birmingham, and continues to live in that city. He held a Harkness Fellowship in the United States in 1964-5, a post as visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1969, and was Henfield Creative Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia in 1977. He has lectured and addressed conferences in many countries in Europe and further afield. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 1989 he was chairman of the judges for the Booker Prize.
__His novels are The Picturegoers (1960), Ginger, You're Barmy (1962), The British Museum is Falling Down (1965), Out of the Shelter (1970), Changing Places (1975), for which he was awarded the Hawthornden Prize and the Yorkshire Post Fiction Prize, How Far Can You Go?, which was the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1980, Small World, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1984, and Nice Work, which won the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award in 1988 and was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His work has been translated into fifteen languages.
__David Lodge has written several books of literary criticism, Language of Fiction (1966), The Novelist at the Crossroads (1971), The Modes of Modern Writing (1977) and Working with Structuralism (1981), and has edited several classic novels and anthologies of criticism, including Twentieth Century Literary Criticism (1972) and Modern Criticism and Theory (1988). His most recent work of criticism is After Bakhtin: essays on fiction and criticism (1990).
__Small World was adapted as a television serial, produced by Granada TV, in 1988. David Lodge himself adapted Nice Work as a four-part TV serial for the BBC, broadcast in the autumn of 1989. It won the Royal Television Society's Award for the best drama serial of the year, and David Lodge was also awarded a Silver Nymph for his screenplay at the International Television Festival in Monte Carlo in 1990. He wrote and presented a TV documentary film about an academic conference, Big Words—Small Worlds, broadcast on Channel 4 in November 1987. His first stage play, The Writing Game, was produced at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in May 1990.
__David Lodge is married and has three children.
Penguin 0140-14961-9, 1991, 213pp, £3.99. Cover photo by Michael Isaac
Caroline was eleven years old when her father accused her of murdering her mother.Morphine & Dolly Mixtures was adapted by BBC Wales starring Patrick Bergin and Joanna Griffiths. It was produced by Ruth Kenley-Letts and written & directed by Karl Francis. It was broadcast in 1991 as part of the BBC's Screen Two series and won a BAFTA Cymru award.. IMDB.
__By then he was in the grip of morphine addiction—from pills prescribed to treat a crippling lung cancer—which made him a menace to his own children.
__Set in the 1950s, Morphine & Dolly Mixtures is the shocking real-life story of Caroline's courageous struggle to protect herself and her three younger brothers and baby sister from their father's emotional and physical abuse, while the local community watched helplessly from the sidelines.
__Carol-Ann Courtney's moving narrative portrays the terrifying plight of a child at the mercy of an all-powerful father—a child who had to wait many years before she discovered the truth about her mother's death.
About the author [1991]
Born in England in 1945, Carol Ann remained in care following the conclusion of this book until she was sixteen. The sequel, A Shilling for the Axe-man, covers this period until her first marriage at sixteen, which resulted in her first three children. Sadly, this marriage failed, and Carol-Ann and her children faced many years of homelessness.
__In 1972 life took a dramatic change when she found herself working for a Bristol Housing Association and met, and subsequently married, her present husband, David, an architect. She now lives in Penarth, South Wales, and has five children, and three grandchildren. Carol-Ann is at present working on another book.
__Morphine & Dolly Mixtures won first prize for prose in the Welsh Arts Council awards and was listed among the top twenty titles of the Feminist Book Fortnight.
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