It is Britain in the late 1950s: every weekday the BBC Home Service broadcasts "The Parkers" from 4.30 to 4.45 (the signature tune is a country dance called 'Sellinger's Round'). It has an avid following. For this novel, Paul Binding hit upon the brilliant idea of creating a radio soap opera, everything revolves around it, and all the characters, in one way or another, are under its influence.

There is, for instance, Bruno, as arrogant as he is handsome, his Aunt Eileen (addicted to "The Parkers"), his adoring cousin Ian, Verity Orchard (in one review likened to Virginia Woolf cross-pollinated with Elfine Starkadder from Cold Comfort Farm) and her sexually ambiguous husband Charles Compson.

This is a glorious, effervescent but at times sad novel recreating its period with acute and affectionate accuracy.

In a long and admiring review in the Spectator, Zenga Longmore concluded:

'This book bursts with surprises both funny and brutal. Every character has a hidden jack-in-the-box 'other side' which pops out to hit poor Bruno in the face just as he thinks he has manipulated things so nicely.

Paul Binding has produced an original masterpiece, an ingenious concoction of school essays, letters, radio scripts and cantering narrative. His portrayal of 1950s rock'n'roll, furniture, books, magazines leaves one asking how he can so vividly recall the details. Is it memory or meticulous research?

This is an exquisitely crafted novel, comic but oh so agonising.'

Lorca is one of the greatest modern poets. His later and most powerful works however remain elusive even to Lorca scholars. For just as Lorca cannot be understood in isolation from the cultural traditions of Spain and Andalusia, so it is also necessary to appreciate the poet's vantage point as a gay person, if his meaning is to be fully understood. The hinge of this stimulating and emphatic study is Lorca's visit to New York in 1929. Many of the tensions of his New York poems are show to be anticipated in his earlier works. The book goes on to trace in Lorca's subsequent writings the impact of his confrontation with the American metropolis, and the sharpened awareness of a gay identity to which this gave rise.

St Martin's Ride was first published in 1990 just after the tumultuous events of the previous year that reshaped Europe. It was timely then, it is timely now. Born in 1943, Paul Binding was taken by his parents to live in Essen, a city destroyed by British bombing during the Second World War. His experiences in that ruined city haunted him for years, until, in 1989 he joined the scenes of wild rejoicing as the Berlin Wall came down and a new era was ushered in. Part-autobiography, part-meditation on the dilemmas of Europe, St Martin's Ride is an utterly original and deeply moving exploration of the uncertainties that affected Europeans for nearly half a century. 'One of those rare masterpieces which portrays the peculiar truth of the world of grown-ups in the mind of a child who has been thrust into excruciating circumstances. Literary art of a very rare kind.' Stephen Spender, Independent on Sunday 'A book as beautiful as it is profound.' Theodore Zeldin

First published in 1994, Paul Binding's portrait of Eudora Welty is being reissued to coincide with the 100th anniversary of her birth. Eudora Welty was a Pulitzer Prize winner and recipient of numerous literary friendships and awards. She was one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth-century. Born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi. Eudora Welty was brought up in the harsh American South when it was bedevilled both by the Depression and racial discrimination. Her acclaimed novels and short stories however are imbued with compassion and optimism, while also revealing her extraordinary gift for inhabiting the inner world of her characters. Paul Binding knew Eudora Welty, and in this book he draws on the many conversations he had with both her and her friends and fellow writers. The Still Moment presents a critical portrait of a remarkable mind and a profoundly humanist writer.

It's the Fifties, and every weekday all of Britain likes to tune in to its favourite BBC radio serial, THE PARKERS. No wonder a young man at a loose end, and frustrated by his rejection for National Service, gravitates towards the makers of the programme - to its founder, the enigmatic Verity Orchard, her ambivalent husband Charles, and Cassie, daughter of 'Elizabeth Parker' herself. They all make claims on him - claims that will pursue him down the years into late middle age. And then there's his cousin, lan...Paul Binding's novel is a poignant examination of emotional and cultural confusion. Both funny and sad, it captures the ambience of a fascinating period of British life. Resonant with the intrigue of soap opera it is a novel full of character and characters, a post-modern journey through an England long-since disappeared.

INTRODUCED BY PAUL BINDING 'I'm a huge fan of Barbara Pym' Richard Osman 'I'd sooner read a new Barbara Pym than a new Jane Austen' Philip Larkin Dulcie Mainwaring is always helping others, but never looks out for herself - especially in the realm of love. Her friend Viola is besotted by the alluring Dr Aylwin Forbes, so surely it isn't prying if Dulcie helps things along? Aylwin, however, is smitten with Dulcie's pretty, young niece. And perhaps Dulcie herself, however ridiculous it might be, is falling, just a little, for Aylwin. Once life's little humiliations are played out, maybe love will be returned, and fondly, after all . . . 'One of her very best - comic, heartrending, brave; in short, like life itself' Shirley Hazzard 'No novelist brings more telling observation or more gentle pleasure' Jilly Cooper

'A disturbing, dark novel and an auspicious debut.' - Brian Moore
'The obsessive love of one brother for another makes absorbing reading. The picture of the selfish cold father is very convincing, I found the unwitting betrayal of the father by the despised son most moving. There are fine descriptions throughout.' - James Purdy
'Extraordinarily tightly plotted, well - and in places, brilliantly - written, and concerned with issues of major human importance.' - "British Book News"
'A real talent for describing places, and an admirable restraint which gives his writing tautness. The book is fired by sincerity ... the writing is admirable.' - "Books and Bookmen"
'A carefully husbanded talent with skill and sensitivity ... drawn with arresting acidity ... vividly evoked.' - Jonathan Keates, "Observer"
Dan Varney, in Madrid for a conference, goes in search of a night of adventure to help take his mind off the terrible events of one year earlier, when an act of betrayal left his father dead and his beloved brother James in an institution. The unexpected sound of a harmonica playing one of James's favourite tunes draws Dan to Kevin, a handsome English youth with a dark secret and a connection to Dan's own past. Dan and Kevin feel not only attraction but sympathy, but when Dan learns of Kevin's role in the mysterious tragedy that struck the Varney family, could any kind of relationship survive? This new edition of Paul Binding's Harmonica's Bridegroom coincides with the 30th anniversary of the novel's original publication and features a new afterword by the author.

"An achievement by a writer completely master of his technique, and I strongly recommend it." - C. P. Snow, "Sunday Times"
"Voluptuously readable . . . an impressive piece of work." - "New Statesman"
" R]are, and indeed astonishing . . . exercise s] a continuous fascination." - Lionel Hale, "The Observer"
"Mr. King has something to say in this novel, and he knows how to say it." - John Betjeman, "Daily Telegraph"
In Florence on business, Max Westfield has brought his wife and children with him to make a holiday of it. But while shrewdly perceptive in financial matters, Max is completely blind to the passions and tragedies that soon begin to surround him. His wife despises him and is brazenly having an affair with a cynical expatriate, his secretary wants to be his mistress and dreams of accompanying him back to England, and his teenage son has fallen in love with a working-class Italian youth. With what Paul Binding calls his "darkly penetrative vision of existence," Francis King weaves these narrative threads into a complex and gripping story of isolation, despair, and death beneath the intense glare of the Tuscan sun.
Francis King (1923-2011) received favourable reviews for his first three novels, but it was his fourth, "The Dividing Stream" (1951), winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, that secured his international reputation as one of the foremost young writers of his generation. This edition, the first in more than 60 years, includes a new introduction by novelist and critic Paul Binding and a reproduction of the original dust jacket art by Leslie Wood.

A new account of the brilliant and prolific Danish writer whose works captivated readers across Europe Rarely does an American or European child grow up without an introduction to Hans Christian Andersen's "The Ugly Duckling," "The Princess and the Pea," or "Thumbelina." Andersen began publishing his fairy tales in 1835, and they brought him almost immediate acclaim among Danish and German readers, followed quickly by the French, Swedes, Swiss, Norwegians, British, and Americans. Ultimately he wrote more than 150 tales. And yet, Paul Binding contends in this incisive book, Andersen cannot be confined to the category of writings for children. His work stands at the very heart of mainstream European literature. The author considers the entire scope of Andersen's prose, from his juvenilia to his very last story. He shows that Andersen's numerous novels, travelogues, autobiographies, and even his fairy tales (notably addressed not to children but to adults) earned a vast audience because they distilled the satisfactions, tensions, hopes, and fears of Europeans as their continent emerged from the Napoleonic Wars. The book sheds new light on Andersen as an intellectual, his rise to international stardom, and his connections with other eminent European writers. It also pays tribute to Andersen's enlightened values-values that ensure the continuing appeal of his works.