Böcker av Tim Lott

Yes! No! But Wait...! is the most straightforward book on writing a novel ever published. It is also the most practical, honest and useful. Tim Lott admits he can't teach someone how to write a novel (that's one of the myths propagated by the novel-writing industry). But he can help anyone construct a solid platform on which they can stand to discover whether they have the talent, will and imagination required of any novelist. A distillation of a lifetime's reading, writing and thinking about stories and how to tell them, Yes! No! But Wait...! is the one book any aspiring author needs.

Winner of the 1999 Whitbread First Novel Award 'Beautiful and brilliant' Tony Parsons Estate agent Frankie Blue is known on his home turf - White City, Shepherd's Bush - as 'Frank the Fib'. He's a liar - but one who always tries to tell the truth. Frankie has been friends with Diamond Tony, a hairdresser, Colin, a computer nerd, and Nodge, a cabbie, since schooldays. Now they are thirty and trying to live the same life as they did then - drinking, girls, banter, football. Then comes Frankie's Great Betrayal - Veronica, and marriage, his ticket to a bigger, better grown-up world. From the moment he tells his mates, the whole patchwork of their friendships begins to collapse - revealing the sad, shocking but often hilarious truths that lie underneath. 'Caustically funny and sometimes very affecting ... with sardonic wit and a kind of tough tenderness, Lott portrays people growing up, growing apart or growing together' Sunday Times 'Mordantly funny ... Observations are vivid, the dialogue crisp and, crucially, the characters are sympathetic' Tatler

The brilliant new novel from the author of The Last Summer of the Water Strider

Tim Lott's parents, Jack and Jean, met at the Empire Snooker Hall, Ealing, in 1951, in a world that to him now seems 'as strange as China'. In this extraordinarily moving exploration of his parents' lives, his mother's inexplicable suicide in her late fifties and his own bouts of depression, Tim Lott conjures up the pebble-dashed home of his childhood and the rapidly changing landscape of postwar suburban England. It is a story of grief, loss and dislocation, yet also of the power of memory and the bonds of family love.