PFD
Drury House
34-43 Russell Street
London WC2B 5HA
Tel: 020 7344 1000
Fax: 020 7836 9543
Nicholas Mosley
Book Agent: Michael Sissons
Dramatic Rights: Anthony Jones

Nicholas Mosley, born in 1923, is the author of thirteen novels, including ACCIDENT, IMPOSSIBLE OBJECT, HOPEFUL MONSTERS (which won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 1991), THE HESPERIDES TREE, two biographies, a travel book, a book about religion and most recently the novel INVENTING GOD. He lives in London.


TIME AT WAR

ORION (25 Aug 06)

Nicholas Mosley, son of Oswald Mosley and his first wife, is an admired novelist, most famous for ACCIDENT, filmed by Joseph Losey from a Harold Pinter screenplay and starring Dirk Bogarde.
Although he has previously published an autobiography, Nicholas Mosley has hitherto avoided writing about his WWII experience, in which his tangled relationship with his father, Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British fascist movement, plays a major part.
TIME AT WAR shows Mosley coming of age as a young officer in the forcing house of war and being despatched as part of the Rifle Brigade to join the allies as they fight their way up Italy. At one point he ignominiously loses most of his platoon. Eventually he leads his men to capture a strategic farmhouse not far from Monte Cassino and wins the MC.
Mosley gives his account against the backdrop of being the son of Britain's fascist leader who was imprisoned with his second wife (Diana, one of the Mitford sistrs) in Brixton jail not long after the outbreak of war. What would have happened if Nicholas had been captured by the Germans and then identified?
In fact at one point in the Italian campaign this happens. How he survives demonstrates that fact can sometimes be more bizarre than fiction.
TIME AT WAR is both an absorbing war memoir and intriguing account of a relationship unlike any other in WWII. How do you live your life when Britain is fighting the axis powers when your father is the self-proclaimed British fascist leader?

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LOOK AT THE DARK

SECKER (8 Apr 05)

"We don`t know that any worlds other than our own exist unless we look at the night sky in the dark." So says a retired academic and writer as he lies in a hospital bed in New York. He has come there from his home in London to appear as a pundit on television - only to be knocked down by a car. Formerly an anthropologist, he is tired of looking for order and reason in the world he can see around him. But his views on human nature and war are provocative, and he has begun to find himself in demand. The forced Inactivity allows him to reflect on the course of his life - the work he has done, the women he has known - and characters from it begin to gather round him: his first wife Valerie, his second wife Valentina, his son Adam, and later his step-daughter Cathy. He considers his first marriage and the curious version of fidelity that evolved from it; his days of teaching at Oxford, and the trip to Iran that saw him return with Nadia, a young girls whom he assisted in escaping to a different life in England.

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THE USES OF SLIME MOULD

PFD (4 Oct 04)

Essays of Four Decades

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INVENTING GOD mass-market paperback April 2004

SECKER (2 Jan 03)

Hafiz is a twenty-five year old Muslim doing post-graduate work in genetics at the University of Beirut. He is one of a team working on the possibility of fashioning a biological weapon that would be effective against some ethnic groups and not others. This project seems to him impossible, but still highly dangerous. Lisa is a sixteen year old Israeli girl who feels threatened by the Jewish insistence on dwelling on memories of the Holocaust. She looks for a way out to a future. Maurice Rotblatt is a middle-aged ex-television-guru who comes to the Middle East and calls for a plague on all ethnic and religious belligerents. He then disappears. His friends in England wonder - is he a victim? A trickster? Or has he left hints about some hope for a future? The story ends in September 2001.

It is by the ability to look at the interweaving actions and aspirations of many different characters - in Lebanon, Israel, Turkey, England - that there might be a chance, it is suggested, for humans to be nudged out of their self-destructive genetic and environmental conditioning.

INVENTING GOD is a fascinating and highly topical new novel from a previous winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year award.

ISBN: 0 436 21011 8

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THE HESPERIDES TREE

SECKER (2 Feb 01)

Reminiscent in theme and style to his Whitbread Award-winning Hopeful Monsters, Nicholas Mosley's The Hesperides Tree tells of a young man frustrated by the inability of his two chosen courses of study - biology and literature - to adequately define the world. Baffled by several life-shaping coincidences that seem to be part of life itself, he embarks on a physical and intellectual journey in search of a girl he fell in love with years earlier. This journey leads him to a deserted island off the coast of Ireland and, perhaps, to the mythical Garden of the Hesperides, home of the Tree of Life.

ISBN: 0 436 20548 3

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JULIAN GRENFELL

  (22 Dec 99)

A portrait of the First World War poet, killed in 1915, and of his mother Ettie Desborough, by one of our foremost writers.

ISBN: 0 9534780 9 2


CHILDREN OF DARKNESS & LIGHT

SECKER (29 Oct 96)

Reports are reaching London that a group of children in Cumbria have seen a vision of the Virgin Mary. Harry, a journalist with a drink problem, is sent to investigate. What he finds defies comprehension, but most bafflingly, Harry's visit seems to have been expected.


NATALIE NATALIA

SECKER (18 Aug 95)

On the verge of a nervous breakdown, Anthony Greville, a disenchanted politician, travels to Africa to report on a revolt against a white government. Embroiled in an adulterous affair with Natalie Natalia, and paralyzed by his brittle life, he suffers a complete mental collapse.


MEETING PLACE

SECKER (14 Aug 95)


EFFORTS AT TRUTH

SECKER (17 Oct 94)

Nicholas Mosley - novelist, biographer, screenwriter and editor - describes his professional life dealing with words and his struggle with the paradox of trying to get at reality through writing

ISBN: 0 7493 9603 2


ASSASSINS

OCTOPUS (1 Aug 93)

Tight security around the Foreign Secretary's home during important East-West talks, fails to prevent his teenage daughter from leaving the grounds on horseback. When a young man armed with a rifle and telescopic sight encounters her in nearby woods, he refuses to let her back in.


IMPOSSIBLE OBJECT

OCTOPUS (14 Mar 93)


ACCIDENT

OCTOPUS (14 Jan 93)

An Oxford don's explanation of a fatal accident induces him to interpret, via the games academics play - with their students and themselves, in college and at home, in bed or on the river - the paradoxes of love and betrayal, marriage and infidelity. By the author of "Hopeful Monsters".


CATASTROPHE PRACTICE

SECKER (9 Jan 92)

This novel, in the form of three plays with prefaces and a novella, follows six characters trying to find their way through some catastrophe that is less in the world outside than in their minds. Each tries to put catastrophe theory into practice in order to break through to something different.

ISBN: 0 436 28845 1


IMAGO BIRD

SECKER (7 Nov 91)

Bert is 18 years old and staying with a relation in London who happens to be the Prime Minister. Exposed to the world of gossip column politics, intrigue and rumours, Bert has difficulty separating what is serious from what is not. This is the second book in Mosley's "Catastrophe Practice" series.

ISBN: 0 7493 9908 2


SERPENT

SECKER (7 Nov 91)

On board a plane, Jason, a scriptwriter working on a film about Masada, is involved in a series of conflicts involving a possible hijacker, his own past and a contemporary crisis in Israel. This is the third book in Mosley's "Catastrophe Practice" series.

ISBN: 1 56478 244 1


HOPEFUL MONSTERS

SECKER (4 Jun 90)

Whitbread Book of the Year 1991

This Whitbread Book of The Year Award winner for 1990 is the final novel of the "Catastrophe Practice" series. Set in the 1920s and 30s it tells the story of two young radicals, Max and Eleanor, who meet, love, separate and come together again during the maelstrom of the Spanish Civil War.

ISBN: 0 7493 9112 X


JUDITH

SECKER (4 Aug 86)

This fourth book in the "Catastrophe Practice" series follows the story of Judith, an aspiring young actress involved with drugs who lands herself in increasingly chaotic settings. Nicholas Mosley is the author of 12 novels and won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for "Hopeful Monsters".

ISBN: 0 436 28853 2


RULES OF THE GAME

HARPERCOLLINS (31 Oct 83)


BEYOND THE PALE: MEMOIRS OF SIR OSWALD MOSLEY AND FAMILY

SECKER (31 Oct 83)


THE ASSASSINATION OF TROTSKY

MICHAEL JOSEPH (Jan 1972)


SPACES OF THE DARK

 


THE RAINBEARERS

 


CORRUPTION

 


AFRICAN SWITCHBACK

 


THE LIFE OF RAYMOND RAYNES

 


EXPERIENCE AND RELIGION