AS the twentieth century breathes its very last, with Britpop at its zenith, twenty-seven-year-old A&R man Steven Stelfox is slashing and burning his way through London's music industry. Blithely crisscrossing the globe in search of the next megahit--fueled by greed and inhuman quantities of cocaine--Stelfox freely indulges in an unending orgy of self-gratification. But the industry is changing fast and the hits are drying up, and the only way he's going to salvage his sagging career is by taking the idea of "cutthroat" to murderous new levels.

John Niven's little brother Gary was fearless, popular, stubborn, handsome, hilarious and sometimes terrifying. In 2010, after years of chaotic struggle against the world, he took his own life at the age of 42. Hoping for the best while often witnessing the worst, John, his younger sister Linda and their mother, Jeanette, saw the darkest fears they had for Gary played out in drug deals, prison and bankruptcy. While his life spiralled downward and the love the Nivens' shared was tested to its limit, John drifted into his own trouble in the music industry, a world where excess was often a marker of success. Tracking the lives of two brothers in changing times - from illicit cans of lager in 70s sitting rooms to ecstasy in 90s raves - O Brother is a tender, affecting and often uproariously funny story. It is about the bonds of family and how we try to keep the finest of those we lose alive. It is about black sheep and what it takes to break the ties that bind. Fundamentally it is about how families survive suicide, 'that last cry, from the saddest outpost.'

"Music From Big Pink" is a factional novella: a place where fictional characters rub shoulders with real people, and where actual documented events thread their way through the text alongside imagined scenarios. Through the eyes of twenty-three-year-old Greg Keltner, drug dealer, wannabe musician, and hanger-on, we witness the gestation and birth of an album that will go on to cast its spell across forty years. John Niven brings these characters to life with remarkable skill, and the result is an exhilarating, vivid, and powerfully moving book about the highs - and lows - of creating musical history.

Meet Steven Stelfox.

London 1997: New Labour is sweeping into power and Britpop is at its zenith. A&R man Stelfox is slashing and burning his way through the music industry, fuelled by greed and inhuman quantities of cocaine, searching for the next hit record amid a relentless orgy of self-gratification.

But as the hits dry up and the industry begins to change, Stelfox must take the notion of cut throat business practices to murderous new levels in a desperate attempt to salvage his career.

_____________________________ 'Hilarious' ADAM KAY 'Mind-blowingly brilliant' DAILY MAIL 'Highly entertaining' EVENING STANDARD 'Loved it' ROBERT WEBB _____________________________ Frank Brill, a retired small-town newspaper editor, has just been given a terminal diagnosis. Rather than compile a bucket list of all the things he's ever wanted to do in his life, he instead has at the ready his 'fuck-it list'. Because Frank has had to endure more than his fair share of personal misfortune, not to mention having to live through two terms of a Trump presidency. Armed with the names of all those who are to blame for the tragedies that have befallen him, it's time for revenge.

God takes a look at the Earth around the time of the Renaissance and everything looks pretty good - so he takes a holiday. In Heaven-time this is just a week's fishing trip, but on Earth several hundred years go by. When God returns, he finds all hell has broken loose: world wars, holocausts, famine, capitalism and 'fucking Christians everywhere'. There's only one thing for it. They're sending the kid back. JC, reborn, is a struggling musician in New York City, trying to teach the one true commandment: Be Nice! His best chance to win hearts and minds is to enter American Pop Star. But the number one show in America is the unholy creation of a record executive who's more than a match for the Son of God ... Steven Stelfox.

GARY is a sweet and decent man. Only two things would improve his life - having children with his gorgeous wife Pauline, and a lower golf handicap. Both are unlikely. PAULINE is wondering how she ended up living in an ugly little house, driving a second-hand car and making a living dressing up as Tinkerbell. She's planning to leave Gary for a self-made carpet millionaire. FINDLAY, the Carpet King of Scotland, wants to trade in his obese wife for a younger model. But if he goes for a divorce she'll take him to the cleaners. If only there was some way she could be made to disappear... LEE, Gary's luckless brother, has botched one too many drug deals. Local crime overlord Ranta Campbell gives him one more job - one last chance to get it right. Lee's done some bad things - but murder? When Gary gets smashed on the head by a golf ball and miraculously develops an absolutely perfect swing, everyone finds their fates rest on the final day of the Open Championship...

Gary Irvine's wife refuses to sleep with him, so he pursues an even stingier mistress: "golf." But despite his spending unconscionable amounts of time and money, his game is wretched. Until the day he takes a perfect swing . . . and then everything goes black.

After waking up from a coma a few weeks later, with a golf-ball-sized dent in his temple, Gary discovers that his last perfect swing has been imprinted on his brain. However, his newfound prowess is accompanied by some troubling side effects, most noticeably Tourette's.

As Gary miraculously advances to the final round of the British Open, his delinquent brother, Lee, stumbles from one botched drug deal to another, his orbit drawing ever nearer to the terrifying local crime lord Ranta Campbell. With their lives on the line, Gary and Lee must rediscover the ties that bind to survive a blood-soaked final round.

***Now available for preorder: KILL 'EM ALL, the stunning sequel to KILL YOUR FRIENDS*** The viciously funny novel by John Niven, bestselling author of Kill Your Friends and Straight White Male. What do you do when a homeless man knows your name? How about when he turns out to be a friend you haven't seen in twenty years? Do you treat him to a hot meal and see him on his way? Give him a wad of middle-class guilt money? Or take him in and get him back on his feet? For Alan, there's no question - only natural that he'd want to see his old mate Craig off the streets, even if only for a few nights, and into some clean clothes. But what if the successful life you've made for yourself - good job, happy marriage, lovely kids, grand Victorian house (you did well out of the property boom, thank you very much) - is one that that your old pal would quite like to have too? Even if it means taking it from you? Following the divergent lives of two childhood friends, No Good Deed is a funny and painful examination of friendship, the strange currents of ambition, loathing, pity and affection that flow between people over the decades, and of men getting older as they fail and succeed.

In the first full-scale biography of Calhoun in almost fifty years, John Niven presents a new interpretation of this preeminent spokesman of the Old South. Skillfully blending Calhoun's public career with important elements of his private life, Niven shows Calhoun to have been at once a more consistent politician and a more complex human being than previous historians have portrayed. This masterly retelling of John C. Calhoun's eventful life is a model biography.

_____________________ The long-awaited sequel to KILL YOUR FRIENDS A Guardian Book of the Year 2018 It is 2017 - the time of Trump, Brexit and fake news. And time for the return of Steven Stelfox, former A&R man who made his millions from a hit reality TV show. Now Stelfox works occasionally as a music industry 'consultant'. A fixer. He's had a call from his old friend James Trellick, president of one of the largest record companies in America. Trellick has a huge problem on his hands in the shape of... Lucius Du Pre. Once the biggest pop star on earth. Now he's a helpless junkie, a prolific sexual predator, and massively in debt to Trellick's record company. And the picture only gets bleaker when the parents of one of Du Pre's 'special friends' begin blackmailing him. Enter Stelfox stage right. He's the perfect man to find a way out of this nightmare, and to make a killing in the process. There's no line he won't cross. _____________________ 'A banging action satirical thriller. But it's also a proper novel about the Trumpian era, of the reality TV era, the fake news era. It's managed to say a lot of things in a way that very few other novels are doing and in a very comedic way' IRVINE WELSH 'A bruising triumph; Amis' MONEY for the Trump generation. What a monster he's created' IAN RANKIN 'John Niven understands our era better than almost anyone' DOUGLAS COUPLAND 'A scabrously entertaining satire of what it is like to be rich and white in the land of the free if you are utterly depraved, "where money doesn't just talk, or swear, it nukes". ... There is a twisted poetry in Niven's mastery of invective' THE TIMES 'Savagely, viciously witty, this frantic hymn to greed is filthy, frenetic and totally fabulous' SUNDAY MIRROR 'A full-throttle send up of toxic masculinity ... Niven at full tilt is always something to behold.'METRO

Kennedy Marr is a novelist from the old school. Irish, acerbic, and a borderline alcoholic and sex-addict, his mantra is drink hard, write hard and try to screw every woman you meet. He's writing film scripts in LA, fucking, drinking and insulting his way through Californian society, but also suffering from writers block and unpaid taxes. Then a solution presents itself - Marr is to be the unlikely recipient of the W. F. Bingham Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Modern Literature, an award worth half a million pounds. But it does not come without a price: he must spend a year teaching at the English university where his ex-wife and estranged daughter now reside. As Kennedy acclimatises to the sleepy campus, inspiring revulsion and worship in equal measure, he's forced to reconsider his precarious lifestyle. Incredible as it may seem, there might actually be a father and a teacher lurking inside this 'preening, narcissistic, priapic, sociopath'. Or is there... Straight White Male is a no-holds-barred look into the mid-life crisis and the contemporary male sexual psyche. It is a brilliant new satire from one of Britain's sharpest writers.

Susan Frobisher and Julie Wickham are turning sixty. Susan has just discovered that her recently deceased husband was not only a swinger but had run up a fortune in debts in pursuing his extravagant double life. Julie's not faring better: living in a council house and working in an old people's home, she's desperate for excitement. When the bank threatens to take Susan's beloved home to clear the debt, the women seek the help of an octogenarian gangster named Nails. Rather than let the bank take everything Susan has, they're going to take the bank. With the help of Nails and a thrill-crazy, wheelchair-bound friend they pull off the daring robbery, and discover that getting away with it is not so easy and that the adventure is only just beginning.

You thought you could leave the past behind. Think again. Donnie Miller counts himself lucky. Living in a beautiful, spacious house in the wild and remote landscape of central Canada, he spends his days writing for the local newspaper, working on a film script, and acting as house-husband. After a troubled and impoverished upbringing in Scotland, he now has all he wants: a caring wife, a bright and happy son, a generous father-in-law. As the brutal northern winter begins to bite, he can sit back and enjoy life. But his peace is soon broken. There are noises in the nearby woods, signs of some mysterious watcher. When the family dog disappears, Donnie makes a horrifying discovery. Is it wolves, as the police suspect, or something far more dangerous, far darker? What secrets has Donnie been keeping? And why does he have the terrible sense that his dream was never going to last? A taut, shocking and visceral novel that will leave you gasping for breath, Cold Hands is the first thriller by the remarkable John Niven.

Salmon P. Chase was one of the preeminent men of 19th-century America. A majestic figure, tall and stately, Chase was a leader in the fight to end slavery, a brilliant administrator who as Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury provided crucial funding for a vastly expensive war, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court during the turmoil of Reconstruction, and the presiding officer of the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson. Yet he was also a complex figure. As John Niven reveals in this magisterial biography, Chase was a paradoxical blend of idealism and ambition. If he stood for the highest moral purposes--the freedom and equality of all mankind--these lofty ideas failed to mask a thirst for power so deeply ingrained in his character that it drove away many who shared his principles, but mistrusted his motives.
Niven provides a vivid description of Chase's early years--his childhood in New Hampshire (where his father's failed business venture and early death left the family all but destitute) and in Ohio (where he was sent to live with his uncle Philander, an Episcopal bishop), his education at Dartmouth, and his early law career in Cincinnati. Niven shows how the plight of the slaves stirred this reticent young lawyer, and how Chase gradually moved to the forefront of the antislavery movement. At the same time, we see how he used his growing prominence in the antislavery movement to forward his political ambitions. Niven illuminates Chase's long tenure as a public man. Twice elected United States Senator, twice chosen governor of Ohio (then the third most populous state in the Union), Chase organized the widespread but diffuse anti-slavery movement into a workable political organization, the Free Soil party (whose slogan "Free Soil, Free Labor, Freemen" Chase coined himself). We read of Chase's work in Lincoln's war cabinet and his tenure as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and we also follow his many political maneuvers, his attempts to undercut rivals, and his poorly run campaigns for presidential nominations. Niven also provides an intimate portrait of Chase's family life--his loss of three wives and four of his six children, and the unfortunate marriage of his beautiful daughter Kate to a rich but dissolute man--and a vivid picture of life at mid-century.
What emerges is a portrait of a tragic figure, whose high qualities of heart and mind and whose many achievements were ultimately tarnished by an often unseemly quest for power. It is a striking look at an eminent statesman as well as a revealing glimpse into political life in 19th-century America, all set against a background of the anti-slavery movement, the Civil War, and the turmoil of Reconstruction.

A full-scale life and times biography of an important Civil War figure.

Transcriptions of Chase's most important letters to the prominent political figures of his day, including Martin and John Van Buren, Gamaliel Bailey, Frederick Douglass, Joshua Giddings, John P. Hale, William H. Seward, and Charles Sumner, are among those collected in this first-ever published edition of his correspondence. Besides offering valuable insight into Chase's character, private life, and cultural affairs, this collection contributes to an understanding of mid-19th-century public policy, particularly antislavery reform politics.