THE INSPIRATION FOR PILLION, STARRING ALEXANDER SKARSGÅRD AND HERRY MELLING

On the Sunday of his eighteenth birthday, in 1975, Colin takes a walk on Box Hill, a biker hang-out. There he accidentally trips over Ray, a biker napping under a tree – and that’s where it all starts. This transgressive, darkly affecting love story between men, winner of the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize, is a stunning novel of desire and domination by one of Britain’s most accomplished writers.

Pillion, the film adaptation of Box Hill starring Alexander Skarsgård and Harry Melling, was an official selection for the Cannes Film Festival 2025 and shown at the London Film Festival 2025.

In Box Hill, a vivid coming-of-age novel, a young man suddenly wakes up to his gay self-on his eighteenth birthday, when he receives the best gift ever: love and sex. In the woodsy cruising grounds of Box Hill, chubby Colin literally stumbles over glamorous Ray-ten years older, leather-clad, cool, handsome, a biker, and a top. (Colin, if largely unformed, is nevertheless decidedly a bottom.) Colin narrates his love-conveying how mind-blowing being with Ray is-in comically humble-pie terms. "If there are leaders then there must be followers, and I had followership skills in plenty just waiting to be tapped. To this day I can't see a fat kid in shorts without wanting to rush over and give him what comfort I can. To tell him it won't always be like this." Mars-Jones uses Colin's naivete to give a fresh view of the world and of love. Before long, however, homophobia, class, family strife, and loss rear their ugly heads. Yet in the end, it seems Colin's modest view oddly takes in the widest horizon: he learns that "people can care about anything." A surprise and a pleasure, Box Hill is an intensely moving short novel.

Pristina, Kosovo, 1999. Barry Ashton, recently divorced, has been deployed as a civil engineer attached to the Royal Engineers corps in the British Army. In an extraordinary feat of ventriloquism, Adam Mars-Jones constructs a literary story with a thoroughly unliterary narrator, and a narrative that is anything but comic through the medium of a character who, essentially, is. Exploring masculinity, class and identity, Batlava Lake is a brilliant story of men and war by one of Britain's most accomplished writers.

'Gripping.' New Statesman 'Compulsive.' Observer 'Strange and exhilarating.' Sunday Times 'A joy to read.' Sunday Telegraph '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

Surrey County in England, im Jahr 1975: An seinem 18. Geburtstag beobachtet Colin am Box Hill, einem Biker-Treffpunkt südlich von London, neugierig die starken Kerle im Motorrad-Outfit. Noch weiß er nicht, dass dieser Tag sein Leben für immer verändern wird. Bis er wortwörtlich über einen der starken Kerle stolpert: Ray. Die natürliche Autorität des deutlich älteren Mannes mit der Lederkluft übt vom ersten Moment an eine unbezwingbare Anziehungskraft auf Colin aus. Die Folgen sind seine erste sexuelle Erfahrung, seine erste Fahrt auf einer Norton Commando und seine erste Beziehung. Noch am selben Tag zieht er bei Ray ein – der Beginn einer sechs Jahre andauernden, streng reglementierten Zweisamkeit, in der sich die Grenzen zwischen Unterwerfung und Geborgenheit auflösen.

Adam Mars-Jones verbindet in "Box Hill" die Geschichte einer SM-Beziehung mit einem großen Panorama der Widersprüchlichkeiten menschlichen Verhaltens. Indem er den Ich-Erzähler Colin die Geschichte mit einem zeitlichen Abstand von knapp zwanzig Jahren erzählen lässt, schreibt er dem Text beiläufig eine Nostalgie ein, die auch den Abgründen des Geschehens eine gewisse Zärtlichkeit zubilligt. Und indem er Ray gleichermaßen als Unterdrücker und als Ikone zeichnet, macht er die Ambivalenz von Colins Gefühlen nachvollziehbar. Das ist sexy und anrührend, traurig und komisch, und entlarvt nicht zuletzt mit einer charmanten Portion britischen Humors das Männerwelt-Idyll der ungebremsten Motorrad-Rennfahrten, drakonischen Machtspielchen und versauten Poker-Runden als Mythos von gestern.

Cedilla continues the history of John Cromer begun by Pilcrow, described by the London Review of Books as ""peculiar, original, utterly idiosyncratic"" and by the Sunday Times as ""truly exhilarating."" These huge and sparkling books are particularly surprising coming from a writer of previously (let's be tactful) modest productivity, who had seemed stubbornly attached to small forms. Now the alleged miniaturist has rumbled into the literary traffic in his monster truck, and seems determined to overtake Proust's cork-lined limousine while it's stopped at the lights.John Cromer is the weakest hero in literature -- unless he's one of the strongest. In Cedilla he launches himself into the wider world of mainstream education, and comes upon deeper joys, subtler setbacks. The tone and texture of the two books is similar, but their emotional worlds are very different. The slow unfolding of themes is perhaps closer to Indian classical music than the Western tradition -- raga/saga, anyone? This isn't an epic novel as such things are normally understood, to be sure. It contains no physical battles and the bare minimum of travel, yet surely it qualifies. None of the reviews of Pilcrow explicitly compared it to a coral reef made of a billion tiny Crunchie bars, but that was the drift of opinion. Page by page, Cedilla too provides unfailing pleasure. It's the book you can read between meals without ruining your appetite.

'Late Spring, directed and co-written by Yasujiro Ozu, was released in 1949, which makes it an old film, or a film that has been new for a long time...' So begins this remarkable essay in narrative reconstruction, which elicits a world of meanings from the reticences of one classic Japanese movie, and reserves to the very end a resolution of its mystery. Adam Mars-Jones gives a virtuoso comeback performance as that lost figure from the earl days of cinema: the film explainer. There has never been a film book like this one.

'We make lazy assumptions about the centre of things and its location. Who's to say that the centre of things isn't in a corner, way over there?' 'People in authority are always saying you should know your rights, though I've noticed they don't much enjoy it when you do.' '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