Product details
Biographical note
Melvyn Bragg is a writer and broadcaster whose first novel, For Want of a Nail, was published in 1965. His novels since include The Maid of Buttermere, The Soldier's Return, A Son of War, Credo and Now is the Time, which won the Parliamentary Book Award for fiction in 2016. His books have also been awarded the Time/Life Silver Pen Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the WHSmith Literary Award, and have been longlisted three times for the Booker Prize (including the Lost Man Booker Prize). He has also written several works of non-fiction, including The Adventure of English and The Book of Books about the King James Bible. He lives in London and Cumbria.Every scene is clear, every character immediately recognisable . . . brilliant
Daily Telegraph
The book is <i>exciting</i> . . . a pleasure to be remembered
Financial Times
It has the lilt and inevitability of an old ballad . . . [He] skilfully portrays the friendships and antagonisms in rural Cumberland, a territory he has staked out as his own
- Paul Theroux, The Times
With this novel, Melvyn Bragg has established his place in English letters to the extent that his Cumbria is as potent a literary region as Hardy's Wessex, Lawrence's Midlands and Housman's Shropshire
New Statesman
Beautifully told . . .the story unfolds with admirable simplicity . . . even the most brutal and inarticulate characters somehow manage to engage our sympathies
Spectator
An effortless writer. He never strains for effect, simply achieves it
Sunday Times
Nothing is harder to convey in fiction than the idea of simple goodness without it appearing soppy or naïve. But Melvyn Bragg succeeds.
Evening Standard
As he demonstrates yet again in <i>Josh Lawton</i>, Melvyn Bragg has a rare ability to communicate both happiness and goodness
Sunday Telegraph
[Bragg] is a poetic eye, a visionary of sorts.
Guardian
The pleasure to be had from this book is that of feeling, without having been exposed to any lies or romantic evasions, that the world is perhaps a better place that one had thought
Sunday Times
A nearly perfect work of art. Within the confines of craggy Cumberland, Bragg brings to life a handful of people, exposes the violence and brutality of British rural life and does it with a skill and sincerity unmatched since D. H. Lawrence.
Newsday
'Brilliant'
Daily Telegraph
'The book is exciting . . . a pleasure to be remembered'
Financial Times
At once a love story and a portrayal of innocence brutally curtailed, Josh Lawton charts the rites of passage of a young Cumbrian farm worker and keen fell runner - an exceptionally good man whose very integrity proves his undoing.
'With this novel, Melvyn Bragg has established his place in English letters to the extent that his Cumbria is as potent a literary region as Hardy's Wessex, Lawrence's Midlands and Housman's Shropshire'
New Statesman