Böcker av Mark Valentine

This new collection of short and some longer stories by Mark Valentine explores 'the Real Map of England', the strange corners of a haunted country. Why is there a Roman altar to the god of the crossroads in a Herefordshire church? What is the significance of a book of tide tables and a shack on the Lincolnshire coast? What is it that waves from a motorway bridge? Where are the 'veiled republics', the citadels of an alternative history? What happens when children enact a ritual in the overgrown fig garden?These beguiling stories evoke the possibility that there are places where we may encounter another reality, rich, mysterious, sometimes alluring, sometimes perilous.Two of the stories are previously unpublished: others have appeared in anthologies that are now out of print or in periodicals in small editions. The author provides an afterword explaining the inspiration for the book.

In this biographical study Mark Valentine enables us to understand more of John William Wall (1910-1989), the diffident, compassionate, highly intelligent and sensitive man who wrote under the pseudonym Sarban.Until recently very little was known about the writer. His three published books, Ringstones (1951), The Sound of His Horn (1952) and The Doll Maker (1953) hinted at a complex personality, and the little available information has only added to the fascination he has exercised. The Sound of His Horn, a cult classic, explores the possibilities of what would have happened if Germany had won World War Two, and was much admired by Kingsley Amis. This science fiction fantasy has been often reprinted, but until recently all that readers were allowed to know of Sarban was that he 'worked in the East and longed for England'.Mark Valentine, however, has delved into the author's own archive and is now able to present us with this study and introductory biography of Sarban. Valentine follows Wall from his working-class roots in Yorkshire through a scholarship to Cambridge University and a distinguished diplomatic career in the Foreign Office and subsequent postings in Cairo, Jedda, Tabriz, Isfahan, Casablanca, Salonika and Paraguay. After leaving the Foreign Office in 1967, Wall worked at GCHQ Cheltenham before his final retirement. And all through his working life Sarban wrote fascinating and subtle fiction of the fantastic.

In The Nightfarers, you will discover the secret of a remote Lincolnshire island, visit the last official of a seventeenth century company of explorers, and watch for the light from a Moorish heliograph tower. You'll encounter a book that speaks for itself, books that aren't quite books, and a rare book that really draws you in. There's also the reincarnation of a decadent occult detective and another, reluctant sleuth who investigates an unusual printing press. Other stories are set in the afterglow of old Empires in interwar Europe, in the same milieu as the author's work in Secret Europe and Inner Europe (shared volumes with John Howard). They depict apocalyptic dawns, strange faiths, the stare of stone masks, a Prague actuary, an astrologer in Trieste, a scholar of lost languages. This new edition of The Nightfarers, the first for over ten years, includes twelve of the original stories and adds two more from the same period.