New Releases by Nicholas Mosley

"The object of life is impossible; one cuts out fabrication and creates reality. A mirror is held to the back of the head and one''s hand has to move the opposite way from what was intended." In these closing lines from Impossible Object, one has embodied both Nicholas Mosley''s subject of love and imagination, as well as his unmatched lyric style. In eight carefully connected stories that are joined by introspective interludes on related subjects, the author pursues the notion, through the lives of a couple seen by different narrators, that "those who like unhappy ends can have them, and those who don''t will have to look for them."

In his final novel, Rainbow People, Nicholas Mosley offers us the distinctly twenty-first-century story of a holy family. A man, a woman, and a child walk together along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, near the border between Greece and Macedonia. They watch as a film is made about the refugee crisis on the beach. While the mother and father, joined by the filmmaker, contemplate the meaning of the crisis, the limited powers of art, the greater powers of fear and faith, the child explores, plays, and constantly transforms before their eyes. Months later, the family travels from their home in England to Calais, France, where an enormous refugee camp called "the Jungle" has sprung up. Here, in this unlikely place, the child shows the adults a graceful way to face the future. Mosley''s Rainbow People is a masterful, powerful book about borders, politics, and hope.

A sequel of sorts both to Nicholas Mosley''s recent novel "God''s Hazard" and his classic nonfiction work Experience and Religion, this examination of the place of faith in contemporary culture embraces with cautious optimism the evidence of a growing "thaw" (in fiction, film, and public discourse) regarding the acceptance of religion in the modern world. Taking a stand against rationalist cynicism no less than mindless fundamentalism, Mosley argues for a clear-sighted form of faith based not on unquestioning certainty but on a continual reappraisal of what is good or right.

"In an almost artificially idyllic cottage on the west coast of Ireland a journalist ponders how his peculiarly modern family has been brought together by a range of conflicts and concerns. Chief among these is the discovery, in an East African refugee camp, of an extraordiinary child - possessed of a special neurological gift that could open new avenues for humanity." --from back cover.

Although Nicholas Mosley has written two volumes of family biography and a volume of memoirs, he has, until now, avoided writing about his World War Two experiences. The son of Sir Oswald Mosley who, as the leader of the British Union of Fascists, had been jailed with his second wife, Diana (one of the Mitford sisters), early on in the war ostensibly as a security risk. Despite this, Nicholas was dispatched to join his regiment, the Rifle Brigade, as the Allies fought their way up the Italian peninsula. He came of age in the forcing house of war, surrounded by the constant threat of capture by the Germans. At one point in the Italian campaign this very nearly happened. How Nicholas got away and survived is an example of how sometimes fact can be more bizarre than fiction. Time at War is both an absorbing memoir and an intriguing account of a relationship unlike any other in World War Two. How do you live your life as a soldier fighting the Axis powers when your father is the self-proclaimed British fascist leader?

Catastrophe Practice, in the form of three plays with prefaces and a novella, follows six characters trying to find their way through some catastrophe that is less in the world outside than in their minds. Drawing upon catastrophe theory to examine the discontinuities in human personality and our tendency to progress suddenly rather than smoothly, the six characters struggle to disrupt traditional ways of being. These characters feel that conventional ways of interpreting the world have become destructive –conventional language, conventional feelings, conventional situations – and try to find a way to realise genuine experience.

Judith is an aspiring young actress and the mistress of a writer on a popular satirical magazine. Her life has increasingly become a dangerous mixture of drugs and self-delusion. When she eventually suffers a breakdown, she seeks healing in an Indian ashram run by an eccentric and even possibly mad guru. But what is at the back of appearances? How calculated is the self-destructiveness from which a new order might emerge? Judith returns to England and joins up with Bert, one of a few friends who have helped her. Bert is making a film about an anti-Bomb demonstration outside a US airbase; the demonstrators have threatened to detonate a bomb themselves in protest. Within this increasingly chaotic setting Judith is led, by way of a search for a lost child of one of her friends, to a place of stillness at the centre. But what attitude makes sense in this sort of world? Who survives? Judith is the third novel based on the interlocking fortunes of the characters in Catastrophe Practise.

As a novelist, biographer, editor, and screenwriter, Nicholas Mosley has always been concerned with the central paradox of writing: if by definition fiction is untrue, and biography never complete, is there a form that will enable a writer to get at the truth of a life? In Efforts at Truth Mosley scrutinizes his own life and work, but examines them as a curious observer, fascinated by the constant interaction of reality and the written word. As a life, it has been colorful, in settings ranging from the West Indies to a remote Welsh hill farm, from war action in Italy to battles with Hollywood moguls, from the Colony Room to the House of Lords. In print, the range has been as wide: editor of a controversial religious magazine, author of the acclaimed novel series Catastrophe Practice, screenwriter of his own work with Joe Losey and John Frankenheimer, biographer of his notorious father Oswald Mosley, and in 1990, winner of the Whitbread Award for his novel Hopeful Monsters.

This Whitbread Book of The Year Award winner for 1990 is the final novel of the "Catastrophe Practice" series. Set in the 1920s and 30s it tells the story of two young radicals, Max and Eleanor, who meet, love, separate and come together again during the maelstrom of the Spanish Civil War.

This vivid and strikingly witty novel examines the contradictions between the public face and the private experience. Nephew to the prime minister of England, eighteen-year-old Bert tries to make sense of the grown-up world around him, a colourful crowd of television personalities, politicians, young, Trokatires, pop stars, and eccentric relatives. With the help of his laconic psychoanalyst, Bert questions the relation between exterior and interior reality, while Mosley himself questions art''s ability to convey these different realities. Both Bert and Mosley triumph over these challenges by the end of this engaging and innovative novel.

Returning to London from a trip to the West Indies, an aspiring writer encounters a bewitching trio of friends whose magic lies in their ability to turn any situation into fantasy. Previously out of place in the world, the narrator falls in love with the young brother-sister pair of Peter and Annabelle, as well as the older, more political Marius. Reality soon encroaches upon the foursome, however, in the form of Marius''s ailing wife, forcing the narrator to confront the dark emptiness and fear at the heart of his friends'' joie de vivre. In this, his second novel—written in the ''50s and never before published—Nicholas Mosley weighs questions of responsibility and sacrifice against those of love and earthly desire, the spirit versus the flesh.

Paradoxes of Peace continues the meditation of Mosley''s Time at War, at the end of which he wrote that humans find themselves at home in war because they feel they know what they have to do, whereas in peace they have to discover this. But what should inform them--custom? need? duty? ambition? desire? Forces pull in different directions--fidelity versus adventurousness, probity versus fun. During the war, Mosley found himself having to combine fondness for his father, Oswald Mosley, with the need to speak out against his post-war politics. In times of peace, his love for his wife and children, too, seemed riddled with paradoxes. He sought answers in Christianity, but came to see organized religion as primarily a social institution. How does caring not become a trap?

"God is said to have given humans freedom. Yet in the story of Genesis, God is a punishing father figure. Why have humans portrayed him this way? Here, a contemporary writer named Adam imagines God behaving as a good father should, seeing it is time for his children to leave home. Adam writes an account of this, and the story of his own child, Sophie, and his relationship with her. The scene moves from London to New York to Israel to Iran and Iraq. And might not God as well as Adam have a wife to take up the cause if things go wrong?"--BOOK JACKET.

"Religion," this book begins, "is a mistrusted word now," and Nicholas Mosley, in this engaging meditation, seeks to repair that trust. Rather than trying to convince or compel the reader to accept his beliefs, he describes how religion functions in the modern world. Elsewhere, Mosley has written, "There is a subject nowadays which is taboo in the way that sexuality was once taboo, which is to talk about life as if it had any meaning." In this book, he describes religion as the source of that meaning. Despair is the fashionable attitude, but it is one Mosley, here and in his many novels, rejects in favor of a cautious optimism. He writes not to persuade, but to explain a worldview that is refreshing for the hope and intelligence it contains.

Publisher Description

Including pieces on Gregory Bateson, William Faulkner, Philip Pullman, Sir Oswald Mosley''s politics, religion and stammering, this diverse collection gathers essays written by Nicholas Mosley over the past forty years. Resembling the behaviour of slime mould - a strange organism made up of separate amoebae that temporarily form a single pillar which then bursts in order to scatter its seeds across the forest floor - the ideas found in these essays converge and disperse, crossing over into other disciplines, and creating a unique way of looking at the world, one echoed in Mosley''s fictional writings.

"The story ends in September 2001. It is by the capacity to understand the interweaving actions and aspirations of many different characters - in Lebanon, Israel, Turkey, England - that there might be a chance, it seems, for humans to be nudged out of their self-destructive genetic and environmental conditioning."--BOOK JACKET.

Reminiscent in theme and style to his Whitbread Award-winning?"Hopeful Monsters," Nicholas Mosley''s?"The Hesperides Tree"?tells of a young man frustrated by the inability of his two chosen courses of study--biology and literature--to adequately define the world. Baffled by several life-shaping coincidences that seem to be part of life itself, he embarks on a physical and intellectual journey in search of a girl he fell in love with years earlier. This journey leads him to a deserted island off the coast of Ireland and, perhaps, to the mythical Garden of the Hesperides, home of the Tree of Life.

Jason is a scriptwriter working on a film about Masada--the fortress where a thousand Jews killed themselves rather than be taken prisoner by the Romans in A. D. 73. He doubts that a film both honest and popular on such a subject can be made, and, while en route to the production site (Jason, producers and stars in first class--his wife and child in tourist), a dispute about the film and a crisis aboard the plane forces Jason to look at his life, his art, and the world around him in several different ways at once.

A journalist investigates the appearance of the Virgin Mary to a group of children in England. The site is near a nuclear power station which had an accident. He remembers children having a similar vision during a nuclear accident in Yugoslavia. Is there a connection?

"Natalie Natalia"?is Nicholas Mosley''s brilliant examination of political life. It revolves around Anthony Greville, a conservative Member of Parliament who is tormented by his ambivalence toward his career, by his religious doubts, and by his adulterous affair with Natalia Jones, the enigmatic wife of a colleague. The course of their affair dramatizes love in its most creative and perilously destructive aspects, the two facets symbolized in the two names he has for his lover: "I sometimes called Natalia Natalie instead of Natalia," Greville says, "when she was the ravenous rather than the angelic angel... What Natalie said was often a code for what Natalia was meaning." Ranging in setting from England to Central Africa, the novel is a remarkable investigation of ethics, with fiction itself as an ethical activity.

"Published with the assistance of the Illinois Arts Council."

A biography of the First World War poet Julian Grenfell. It helps readers to understand why Julian and his generation seemed to want to die in battle. It also brings Edwardian society to life, as well as describes his relationship with his mother.

The experiences of the author and novelist Hugo Charteris while traveling by car from Dakar to Lagos.