Blake Morrison Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Justification of Johann Gutenberg (1984)
  2. South of the River (2007)
  3. The Last Weekend (2010)
  4. The Executor (2018)

Collections

Plays

  1. The Cracked Pot (1996)
  2. Oedipus / Antigone (2003)
  3. We Are Three Sisters (2011)

Picture Books

  1. The Yellow House (1987)

Anthologies edited

  1. New Writing 12 (2003)

Non fiction

  1. The Movement (1980)
  2. Seamus Heaney (1982)
  3. And When Did You Last See Your Father? (1993)
  4. As If (1997)
  5. Picturing Myself (1997)
  6. Too True (1998)
  7. Things My Mother Never Told Me (2002)
  8. Black Marks and Blue Pencils (2006)
  9. Two Sisters (2023)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Plays Book Covers

Picture Books Book Covers

Anthologies edited Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Blake Morrison Books Overview

The Justification of Johann Gutenberg

He has been called the most influential man of the last millennium, he launched a communications revolution, and he changed the written word for ever. This is his tale, and the story behind his heretical invention. Reading between the lines of history, Blake Morrison has woven a stunning novel around the few facts known about the life and work of Johann Gensfleisch, aka Gutenberg, master printer, charmer, con man and visionary the man who invented ‘artificial writing’ and printed the ‘Gutenberg’ Bible, putting thousands of monks out of work. In a first novel that is both dazzling in its artistry and pure enchantment for the reader, Morrison gives Gutenberg’s final testament: a justification and apologia dictated, ironically enough, to the kind of pretty young scribes whom his invention of movable metal type made redundant. Through the eyes of the ageing narrator, the Middle Ages are seen in a strange and vivid new light. The Plague, craft guilds, religious wars, chivalric love, sexual politics, scientific invention, the rise of capitalism all are here, but the human dramas they give rise to seem anything but ‘historical’ or remote. What Morrison captures is a moment of cultural transition as dramatic and immediate as the communications revolution of today. But, above all, there is the exasperating, endearing and finally haunting figure of Gutenberg himself a man who gambled everything money, honour, friendship and a woman’s love on the greatest invention of the last millennium.

The Yellow House

A favorite back in print! A child discovers, in the old house and overgrown garden she pas*ses every day, that wonders wait in secret. One day, on the way to the park, a little girl climbs the gate of an old yellow house. Although no one has lived there for a very long time, a little boy suddenly appears before her. ‘Come and play with me,’ he beckons. He leads her through an enchanted garden, showing her all its marvelous inhabitants: a tiger playing with its cubs in the long grass, a dolphin leaping in the goldfish pond, a pelican roosting high in the apple tree. Then the mysterious boy is gone, the girl’s mother is calling, and all is as it was before. In this well loved picture book, Blake Morrison and Helen Craig bring us to a place where, for a moment, magic is real.

Seamus Heaney

Offers a brief profile of the Irish poet, examines the major themes running through his works, and as*sesses his place in modern literature.

And When Did You Last See Your Father?

Soon to be a major motion picture, directed by Anand Tucker and starring Colin Firth and Jim Broadbent
And When Did You Last See Your Father?? Was it last weekend or last Christmas? Was it before or after he exhaled his last breath? And was it him really, or was it a version of him, shaped by your own expectations and disappointments?

Blake Morrison’s subject is universal: the life and death of a parent, a father at once beloved and exasperating, charming and infuriating, domineering and terribly vulnerable. In reading about Dr. Arthur Morrison, we come to ask ourselves the same searching questions that Blake Morrison poses: Can we ever see our parents as themselves, or are they forever defined through a child’s eyes? What are the secrets of their lives, and why do they spare us that knowledge? And when they die, what do they take with them that cannot be recovered or inherited?

As If

This volume seeks to expose the hollowness of condemnation divorced from understanding in relation to the Bulger murder trial. People have almost become desensitized to random murder. It is often explained away by madness, sexual fantasy or rejection. One murder in recent times reduced every person to silence: the abduction and beating to death of a helpless infant by two ten year old boys. How and why did two innocent boys kill another? Is childhood innocence a myth? And what punishment could fit such a crime, assuming that children are fit to stand trial for murder? Blake Morrison went to the trial in Preston, and discovered a sad ritual of condemnation with two bewildered children at the centre. He looked for possible explanations in the boys’ families, their dreary environment, their fantasies, their exposure to violent films. He evokes the worst feats of parents through candid and raw memories of his relations with his own children, and delves into his own childhood to reveal the worst thing he has ever done, to show how easy it is to go along with cruelty. Blake Morrison is the author of two collections of poetry, ‘Dark Glas*ses’ and ‘The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper’, and is co editor of ‘The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry’. His memoir, ‘And When Did You Last See Your Father?’ won the Waterstone’s/Esquire Award for non fiction and the J.R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography in 1993.

Things My Mother Never Told Me

In his masterpiece of family literature, ‘And When Did You Last See Your Father?’, Blake Morrison’s mother appears as an intriguing but mostly silent figure. This is her startling and touching story and a son’s search to discover the truth about the remarkable Kerry girl who qualified as a doctor in Dublin in 1942, worked in British hospitals throughout the war, and then reinvented herself again to adapt to a quieter post war family life. At the heart of the book, there’s a passionate wartime love affair, seen through the frank, funny, furious letters his parents wrote during their courtship. It evokes a surprising picture of life and love in WWII. ‘Things My Mother Never Told Me‘ is a revealing and poignant anatomy of family conflict, love, war and finally marriage. Kim Morrison emerges quietly, magically form the shadows, a determined hero*ine for our times.

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