Rupert Thomson

There were very few land burials in Moon Beach. It was considered old-fashioned, unhealthy and something that only happened to the poor. Instead the dead were buried in ocean cemeteries, twelve miles out. A special festival was held every year in their honour. Children loved it. They were given white chocolate bones, marzipan skulls and ice-cream coffins on a stick. There were costume parties too. You had to wear something blue because that was the colour people went when they were buried under the sea. You could paint your hands and face if you liked, or even dye your hair. That's what people did in Moon Beach. Turned blue once a year. And then they turned blue forever...

On a bright spring day in Amsterdam a man goes out to buy a packet of cigarettes. He is a dancer - charismatic, talented and physically beautiful. What happens next takes him completely by surprise and marks him for ever. He awakens to find that he has been abducted by three hooded strangers and subsequently imprisoned in a mysterious white room, which will have consequences that are both poignant and highly disturbing.

At the turn of the century Théophile and Suzanne Valence sail into the Mexican copper-mining town of Santa Sofìa. Théo has travelled here to build a metal church designed by his mentor, the great engineer Gustave Eiffel. His wife Suzanne, wayward and graced with the gift of clairvoyance is deeply in love and has insisted on accompanying him. But the magical landscape inspires no answering passion in Théo. In her loneliness she turns to the American gold prospector Wilson Pharaoh, and soon he, like the town and its inhabitants, falls under her spell, an enchantment as seductive as Suzanne herself.

In his first venture into non-fiction, the celebrated novelist Rupert Thomson has produced one of the most extraordinary and unforgettable memoirs of recent years. On a warm, sunny day in July 1964, Thomson returned home from school to discover that his mother had died suddenly while playing tennis. Twenty years later, Thomson and his brothers receive word that their father, who suffered chronic lung damage during the war, has died alone in hospital. In an attempt to come to terms both with their own loss and with their parents' legacies, the three brothers move back into their father's house. The time they spend in this decadent, anarchic commune leads to a rift between Thomson and his youngest brother, a rift that will not be addressed for more than two decades. This Party's Got to Stop works Thomson's memories into a powerful mosaic that reveals the fragility of family life in graphic and often heartbreaking detail. It is both a love letter to a lost brother and a chronicle of the murderousness and longing that can characterize blood relationships.

Billy Tyler en midaldrende engelsk politibetjent bliver sendt ud til kapellet på et sygehus i Suffolk. Han skal i de næste tolv timer - fra syv aften til syv morgen - holde vagt over liget af en berygtet barnemorderske. Overvåge og sørge for at der ikke sker noget som Billys overordnede udtrykker det. Som garvet betjent er Billys tilgang til opgaven naturligvis strengt professionel. Det er jo bare en opgave. Men efterhånden som natten skrider frem begynder den døde kvindes tilstedeværelse alligevel at krybe ind under huden på ham. Samtidig trænger Billys egne bekymringer sig på: Karrieren i politiet er for længst gået i stå ægteskabet knager og problemerne med en handicappet datter gør ikke tingene nemmere.En morders død er baseret på en virkelig historie der tager sin begyndelse i 1960´erne hvor en ung kvinde sammen med sin kæreste torterede og myrdede fem mindre børn. Parret blev idømt livstidsstraf. Kvinden døde i november 2002 efter et langt liv i fængsel. Aviserne var fulde af artikler om kvinden som blev omtalt som "en syg morder" - "et monster" - og hendes navn synonymt med ondskab.

After decades in prison for crimes gruesomely familiar to everyone in England, a murderer has finally died of natural causes, no less notorious in death than she was in life. Billy Tyler, a career policeman, has been assigned the task of guarding her body in the hospital morgue. But alone on a graveyard shift his wife begged him not accept, Billy has occasion to contemplate the various turns his life has taken and to discover why it is that on this dark night of the soul the reviled murderer seems to speak to him directly. Death of a Murderer is a gripping novel of crime, punishment, fear, and temptation.

One night a boy who comes to be called Thomas Parry is taken from his family, caught up in a comprehensive unraveling of what had been a united kingdom. Reacting to their country's inexorable decline into consumerism, turpitude, racism, and violence, the powers that be establish four independent republics based on the perceived nature of the citizens assigned to each. These new partitions are reinforced with concrete barricades and razor wire. Renamed, relocated, and granted favored status, Thomas enjoys one success after another until, working as a devoted civil servant, he suddenly falls out of the system entirely.

In an edgy psychological thriller that is as mesmerizing as it is profound, Rupert Thomson fearlessly delves into the darkest realm of the human spirit to reveal the sinister connection between sexuality and power. Stepping out of his Amsterdam studio one April afternoon to buy cigarettes for his girlfriend, a dashing 29-year old Englishman reflects on their wonderful seven-year relationship, and his stellar career as an internationally acclaimed dancer and choreographer. But the nameless protagonist's destiny takes an unthinkably horrifying turn when a trio of mysterious cloaked and hooded women kidnap him, chain him to the floor of a stark white room to keep as their sexual prisoner, and subjected him to eighteen days of humiliation, mutilation, and rape. Then, after a bizarrely public performance, he is released, only to be held captive in the purgatory of his own guilt and torment: The realization that no one will believe his strange story. Coolly revelatory, meticulously crafted, The Book of Revelation is Rupert Thomson at his imaginative best.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Theophile Valance and his wife Suzanne sail into Santa Sofia, a remote Mexican copper-mining town

Based on actual events, NEVER ANYONE BUT YOU is the gripping, beautifully written story of a love affair between two revolutionary female artists who challenged the conventions of art and gender during the long twentieth century.