GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS ANNOUNCEMENTS

GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SIGN MARK BOWLES FOR HIS blistering DEBUT NOVEL all my precious madness

Galley Beggar Press have acquired world rights to Mark Bowles’ exquisite debut ALL MY PRECIOUS MADNESS.

All My Precious Madness is the story of a man at odds with the world. A man who wants to escape his violent past but instead – most emphatically – repeats it.

The son of a policeman turned council worker, Henry Nash has hauled his way from a working class childhood in Bradford, through an undergraduate degree at Oxford, and into adulthood and an academic elite. But still, he can’t escape his anger. As the world – and men in particular – continue to disappoint him, so does his rage grow in momentum until it becomes almost rapturous. And lethal.

A savagely funny novel that disdains literary and moral conventions, All My Precious Madness is also a work of unusual care, craftsmanship and empathy – even if that also means understanding the darkest parts of humanity.

“It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that this press release is one of the hardest we’ve ever had to write,” says Galley Beggar Press co-director Eloise Millar, “because so many of the details we might usually offer – on storyline, plot, and similar – risk spoiling the surprises that this book springs on its readers. It not only has the bite of Evelyn Waugh and Thomas Bernhard at their most acerbic – but also their intelligence.

“All My Precious Madness is a tremendously erudite and graceful novel – keen and acute and with important, blistering things to say about the British class system, our supposedly meritocratic structures… It’s also an excruciating, brilliant satire on masculine fragility. I feel a thrill just thinking about it, and I’m overjoyed that Mark is joining us.”

Galley Beggar Press co-director Sam Jordison says:

“All My Precious Madness is a novel that turns Dark Academia into Really Fucking Dark Academia. Not only does it reinvent that genre in entirely unexpected ways, it presents a new kind of British writing, full-stop. Uncompromising, determinedly philosophical and high-minded – but also primal, brutal and furious. There are times when All My Precious Madness is terrifying. But it is also a hilarious and exhilarating reading experience, full of surprises, mischief and pitch black humour. It tears your whole world down – and has you laughing while it’s doing it. It feels like the perfect book for Galley Beggar Press, and we hope to be publishing Mark long into the future.”

Mark Bowles grew up between Bradford and Leeds, and went on to study English at Liverpool and Oxford Universities. He currently lives in Brockley with his wife and two small children. Of All My Precious Madness and its upcoming publication, Mark says:

“I wanted the reader to come away from this novel feeling that they had witnessed an ‘uncommitted crime’. It’s a story of redemption, but only from the point of view of the narrator! It’s about a man who is, and has always been, at an oblique angle to the world, a man capable of intense feeling, tenderness, eloquence, and casual brutality and preternatural rage. I wanted the poetry and the rage, the anger and the lyricism to be not two parallel strands, but one indissociable cord. Galley Beggar is exactly the publisher I would wish for in bringing this book into the world.”

All My Precious Madness will be published in Autumn 2024.