Nicholas Mosley Books In Order

Catastrophe Practice Books In Order

  1. Catastrophe Practice (1979)
  2. Imago Bird (1980)
  3. Serpent (1981)
  4. Judith (1986)
  5. Hopeful Monsters (1990)

Novels

  1. Corruption (1957)
  2. Meeting Place (1962)
  3. Accident (1965)
  4. Assassins (1966)
  5. Natalie Natalia (1971)
  6. The Assassination of Trotsky (1972)
  7. Tide Is Right (1991)
  8. Children of Darkness and Light (1996)
  9. The Hesperides Tree (2001)
  10. Inventing God (2003)
  11. Look at the Dark (2005)
  12. God’s Hazard (2009)
  13. A Garden of Trees (2012)
  14. Metamorphosis (2014)
  15. Rainbow People (2018)

Collections

  1. The Impossible Object (1968)

Non fiction

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Nicholas Mosley Books Overview

Catastrophe Practice

Catastrophe Practice is a novel in the form of three plays with prefaces and a novella, in which six characters, or actors, try to find their ways through some catastrophe that is less in the world outside than in their minds. They feel that conventional ways of seeing things have become disastrous and instead try to put catastrophe theory into practice in order to break through to something different. Mosley draws upon catastrophe theory to investigate the discontinuities in human personality and our tendency to progress suddenly rather than smoothly. That we do progress underlines the basic optimism of the book. In Catastrophe Practice characters and author try to move away from the tragic or comic models hitherto provided by literature into categories more suited to growth and life. First published in England in 1979, this edition contains an introduction by John Banks, the leading authority on Mosley’s fiction, as well as a new postscript by the author, who has made numerous revisions throughout.

Imago Bird

First paperback edition. An exploration of the inability of language to account for thought and feeling, Imago Bird is also an inventive and witty coming of age story. Eighteen year old Bert, highly intelligent and nephew to the prime minister of England, tries to make sense of the adult world around him a mix of politics, pop stars, and television personalities while struggling with a constant stammer and questions about the relationship between the interior and exterior world. Nicholas Mosley is the author of a dozen novels and half a dozen works of nonfiction including a biography of his father, Sir Oswald Mosley, the notorious leader of the British fascist party. Two of his novels Accident and Impossible Object have been made into films. He lives in London with his wife. First U.S. edition by Dalkey Archive ’89.

Serpent

Jason is a scriptwriter working on a film about Masadathe fortress where a thousand Jews killed themselves rather than be taken prisoner by the Romans in A.D. 73. Jason doubts that a film both honest and popular on such a subject can be made. The story of Serpent takes place on the airplane taking a party of VIP film people to Israel. The dispute about the filmconcerning the nature of loyalty, of sacrifice for the good of societyruns parallel with an actual drama that unfolds on the plane: between Jason, his wife Lilia, a man she befriends who may or may not be a hijacker, and the show business people in first class. A climax is reached in which the conflicts on the plane, Jason’s fanciful ideas for a script on Masada, memories of his past life, and a contemporary crisis in Israel all seem to run parallel and even nudge one anotherat least in imagination. The plane comes down to earth…
This is the third novel in Mosley’s acclaimed Catastrophe Practice series.

Judith

A novel based on the interlocking fortunes of the characters in ‘Catastrophe Practice’.

Hopeful Monsters

1990 Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Award Set in the 1920s and ’30s, Hopeful Monsters is the story of two remarkable people: Max, an English student of physics and biology; and Eleanor, a German Jewess who grows up in politically radical circles in Berlin in the ferment that would lead to the rise of Adolf Hitler and World War II. They meet, love, go their separate ways and come together again during the maelstrom of the Spanish Civil War. The story takes them from Berlin to Cambridge, to Russia, to the Sahara, to a deserted monastery in the Pyreneesand finally to Los Alamos and the making of the atomic bomb. In the course of their travels they meet many of the century’s giants: Wittgenstein, Einstein, Rosa Luxemburg, Hitler, and several others, making Hopeful Monsters as one reviewer put it ‘a vast work, covering the whole of the twentieth century.’ Startlingly ambitious and profound in its insights, this is Nicholas Mosley’s masterpiecea novel in which ideas and action combine in a moving and immensely readable narrative.

Assassins

As one of the characters in Assassins says, ‘Tolstoy was right, you can’t beat the Gods. It’s the small things the warp and woof that make up the pattern. And how much influence do we have over the small? Now that’s a theme for a modern writer.’ And Nicholas Mosley is this writer. Part political thriller and part love story, Assassins explores the ‘small things’ that give shape and meaning to the ‘big events.’

Natalie Natalia

Offers an examination of political life that 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.

Children of Darkness and Light

Many years ago, during a hiatus between his early more conventional novels and his later inventive novels, Nicholas Mosley wrote books that directly treated religion and philosophy, attempting in them to find a way of speaking about religion in a contemporary method that would allow for a religious attitude that was at once sincere and ironic, a difficult balancing act that led to such remarkable novels as Accident, Impossible Object, Natalie Natalia, and finally to his ‘Catastrophe Practice’ series that culminated in his Whitbread Award winning novel Hopeful Monsters. In Children of Darkness and Light, Mosley takes on what for most novelists has been the most challenging of subjects: a novel directly concerned with religious belief. A middle aged, burnt out journalist is sent to the north of England to do a story about the possible appearance of the Blessed Virgin to a group of children, though this may be a rumor initiated by the government to cover up a nuclear disaster. Or both. Out of such conflicting possibilities, Mosley invents a sinister world where nothing is what is seems to be. And as Mosley’s narrator moves through the possibilities of half truths, lies, conspiracies, and betrayals, he himself creates a parallel crisis in his personal life wherein he and his wife are trying to destroy their marriage or save it, oras we come to expect in Mosley novelsdo both at once. And behind all this is the possibility that the narratorhalf philosopher and half would be saintis little more than a middle aged man trying to justify his irresponsibility and infidelity behind a shield of wit and irony.

The Hesperides Tree

One of Nicholas Mosley’s most compelling and provocative novels, The Hesperides Tree draws on the themes explored in his Catastrophe Practice Series the importance of myth and coincidence in our lives. A young man frustrated by the inability of either of his two chosen disciplines biology and English to articulate a complete view of the world leaves his university and embarks upon a quest to find the girl he fell in love with years before, and to understand the relationship among things. His journey leads him to a deserted island home to a species of rapidly evolving birds that may be the mythical Garden of the Hesperides, where the Tree of Life is thought to be.

Inventing God

Set amid the current tension and violence of the Middle East, Whitbread Award winning Nicholas Mosley’s new novel features over a half dozen characters searching for a way to quell the selfdestructive impulses of society. As the novel develops, the actions and aspirations of these characters which include a Muslim student working on the most deadly of biological weapons, a young Israeli girl trapped in a temple’s ruins, and an eccentric ex guru who has mysteriously disappeared create a textual and philosophical pattern illustrating the role chance and coincidence play in our world. In the vein of Hopeful Monsters and The Hesperides Tree, Mosley mixes science, philosophy and contemporary politics around the question of how individual actions can influence the world.

Look at the Dark

A retired academic and writer is becoming a media celebrity of sorts, appearing on various talk shows to voice his controversial views on human nature and war. While in New York to make such an appearance, he becomes the victim of a hit and run set up by the CIA? the FBI? terrorists? and ends up confined to a hospital bed. This forced inactivity allows him to reflect on his life the work he has done, the women he has known as various people from his life gather around him, including both his first and second wives. Reminiscing about his past while dealing with his present, the man begins to see his provocative ideas about fidelity, sin, and grace play themselves out in a virtuosic way that could only be conceived by Nicholas Mosley.

God’s Hazard

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 like this? Here, a contemporary writer called 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 to Iraq. And might not God as well as Adam have a wife to take up the cause if things go wrong?

The Impossible Object

‘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.’ The Impossible Object of the title, ‘the triangle that can exist in two dimensions but not in three,’ is a controlling symbol for the impossibility of realizing the good life unless one recognizes the impossibility of attaining it: only then can it be possible to realize it, through a kind of renunciation, especially in ‘a sophisticated, corrupt, chaotic world.’ Such a provocative theme, comic or tragic by turns, was met by critics in 1968 as brilliant, insightful, intense, and moving, but especially original.

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