Wed 2 Oct
6:30-9pm
Join Mark Bowles as he discusses his debut novel All My Precious Madness with award-winning author and novelist, Sam Mills.
“I had expected to meet my father on the river bank, as he had appeared in my dream, but instead had met with this bulbous fuckshitter from school...”
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.
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 deep empathy – even when that also means understanding the darkest parts of humanity. It is, as critic Stephen Mitchelmore says, the book for everyone who longs for “an English Bernhard” – and to read one of the most electric debuts of the last decade.
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. All My Precious Madness, is his first novel, published in print by Galley Beggar Press and as an audiobook by Spiracle.
SAM MILLS graduated from Oxford University with a degree in English Language and Literature. She is the author of 3 young adult novels published by Faber & Faber, including the award-winning Blackout. In 2020, Fourth Estate published her memoir about being a carer, The Fragments of my Father, which was shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize. She is the co-founder of indie press Dodo Ink and lives in London looking after her father and cat.