Description

Perennially on the outside, Brian has led a solitary life; he works at Camden Council, lunches every day at Il Castelletto cafe and then returns to his small flat on Kentish Town Road. It is an existence carefully crafted to avoid disturbance and yet Brian yearns for more. A visit one day to the BFI brings film into his life, and Brian introduces a new element to his routine: nightly visits to the cinema on London’s South Bank. Through the works of Yasujiro Ozu, Federico Fellini, Agnes Varda, Yilmaz Guney and others, Brian gains access to a rich cultural landscape outside his own experience, but also achieves his first real moments of belonging, accepted by a curious bunch of amateur film buffs, the small informal group of BFI regulars. A tender meditation on friendship and the importance of community, Brian is also a tangential work of film criticism, one that is not removed from its subject matter, but rather explores with great feeling how art gives meaning to and enriches our lives.

Publisher Review

'I don't think I've ever felt such warmth for a character, or that I've been able to see cinema through another's eyes insuch a lucid, sustained way. As Brian moves further and further into a life of moviegoing, ordering his days, and then years, around it, he finds companionship and a calm sense of wellbeing. As I read this beautifully subtle novel, I found the same.' - Amina Cain, author of A Horse at Night 'After having published his luminous Ash Before Oak, Jeremy Cooper now brings us Brian, equally a work of mysterious interiority and poetry. It confirms that however solitary life might be, art enriches both our imaginations and our realities. This is a very tender book.' - Xiaolu Guo, author of A Lover's Discourse 'There's a strange magic to Jeremy Cooper's writing. The way he puts words together creates an incantatory effect. Reading him is to be spellbound, then. I have no idea how he does it, only that I am seduced.' - Ben Myers, author of The Offing 'Jeremy Cooper's work is consistently haunting and layered, built on a refreshing trust in the reader to delve deeper behind the quiet insinuations of his prose. His work resists every modern accelerant, creating a patient and precise tonic. He is easily one of the most thoughtful British fiction writers working today.' - Adam Scovell, author of How Pale the Winter Has Made Us 'Cooper has maximised the potential of this literary convention to achieve a work of great depth and quiet power. Over three decades, a mother and her artist daughter communicate only by letters, excavating their relationship as it evolves with melancholic, astute precision. At times spellbinding and mesmerising, the work also proves provocative and inspirational. As much a love letter to the lost art of letter-writing as it is a thirty year-long dialogue of familial love, Cooper has produced an understated book that nonetheless resonates powerfully. This book is deeply sensitive to the ebb and flow of relationships over time and the way love is disguised, expressed and experienced, and it achieves that elusive dream of all authors and finds new meaning in the recording of life.' - Helen Cullen, Irish Times (Praise for Bolt from the Blue) 'A novel in epistolary form, the writer and art historian's latest work is both an intimate account of a mother-daughter relationship and a lively history of London's art scene. It is October 1985 when Lynn moves to the capital to study at Saint Martin's, later making a successful career as an artist. She and her mother, who is back at home in Birmingham, begin a 30-year-long written relationship - via letters, postcards and emails. Their contact is irregular, and by turns affectionate and combative, making the relationship feel engrossing, deep and utterly true.' - New Statesman (Praise for Bolt from the Blue) 'Low-key and understated, this beautiful book ... is a civilised and melancholy document that slowly progresses towards a sense of enduring, going onwards, and even new life. It feels like a healing experience.' - Phil Baker, Sunday Times (Praise for Ash Before Oak) 'A study in how writing can give lives meaning, and in how it can fail to be enough to keep one afloat, this is a rare, delicate book, teeming with the stuff of real life.' - Publishers Weekly, starred review (Praise for Ash Before Oak)