Magnus Mills Reihenfolge der Bücher

We'd only travelled a few miles when I started wondering how I could rid myself of the three sunbathers. This might sound churlish but actually I felt I owed them no debt of gratitude.

They were probably quite surprised on the Wednesday afternoon when the clearances began. All along the coast, thousands of sunbathers were rounded up without warning and taken away in vans.In the follow-up to The Trouble with Sunbathers, will the president ever stop interfering? Or will it be his son-in-law?

Tales of Muffled Oars is English History with all the nasty bits left out.

There's no doubt that the president was a man of extraordinary ability. His decision to purchase the British Isles was widely acclaimed as an act of genius. It solved our financial difficulties at a stroke. Even so, he could never claim to understand the British people. Not properly.

Mills uses his blokes in the back of a pub to tell a massively ambitious story . A story that could be read as a disguised retelling of the Russian revolution, or the Reformation, or the Sunni-Shia schism, or any great human falling out. As soon as you form any kind of us, Mills suggests, a them will form in response. In this, The Forensic Records Society is like Animal Farm but with blokes for pigs, and much better songs Guardian

In a lush meadow, bounded by dense forest and a sparkling river, the flags of several tents flutter in the breeze, rich with the promise of halcyon days. Yet all is not as tranquil as it may seem: the balance of power wrought between the occupants of The Great Field, as it is properly known, is a delicate one, and relationships are stretched to breaking point when a new, large and disciplined group offers to share its surplus of milk pudding. Only the narrator acknowledges the gesture, but by forging links with the newcomers he becomes a conduit for change, change that threatens The Great Field.

'He has no literary precedent, and he also appears to have no imitators. He mines a seam that no one else touches on, every sentence in every book having a Magnus Mills ring to it that no other writer could produce' Independent

'He has no literary precedent, and he also appears to have no imitators. He mines a seam that no one else touches on, every sentence in every book having a Magnus Mills ring to it that no other writer could produce' - "Independent". In "Hark the Herald", a guest stays at an eerie guesthouse over Christmas without encountering any other residents, despite constant reassurance from the landlord that he would see them if only he arrived for breakfast slightly earlier; in "Only When the Sun Shines Brightly" Aesop's fable about a competition between the Sun and the Wind to get a man to take his coat off, gets a new look involving a railway arch, a builder and a piece of plastic sheeting; in "Once in a Blue Moon", a man arrives home to find the family house under siege, with his mother armed, dangerous and firing at the police with a shotgun, and attempts to appease her with an invitation to seasonal hospitality; and, in the title story, rivalry between three cousins over a faulty toy gets out of hand as the cousins unwittingly imitate the toy they're fighting over. Magnus Mills has published two collections of stories - "Only When the Sun Shines Brightly" and "Once in a Blue Moon" - which are collected here for the first time, along with three new stories.

Zwei Entdeckerteams hetzen sich und ihre Maulesel dem »Entlegensten Punkt der Welt« entgegen, im Wettlauf gegen die Kontrahenten und die Widrigkeiten der spröden Natur. Die wortkargen Männer um die Forscher Johns und Tostig, rauhbeinige Kerle allesamt, erweisen sich im Laufe der Expedition allerdings kaum als heroische Naturbezwinger. Es handelt sich vielmehr um jene verschrobenen bis mimosenhaften Typen des britischen Angestellten- und Arbeiterkosmos, wie sie bereits Mills’ ersten Roman Die Herren der Zäune bevölkern. Wen scheren schon glorreiche Missionsziele, wenn Zeltnachbarn schnarchen und egozentrische Anführer den Feierabend in der Wildnis stören? Was als handfeste Abenteuer- und Entdeckergeschichte beginnt, entpuppt sich Seite um Seite, spätestens, wenn die Maultiere zu sprechen beginnen, als eine ebenso groteske wie grandiose Überdrehung des Genres. Mit der ganzen Kraft des Lakonischen entfaltet Mills erneut ein tiefschwarzes »Männer unter sich«-Szenario und treibt seine herbe englische Komik ins Absurde. Am Ende lassen die Maultiere selbst die Gesetze der Schwerkraft hinter sich, aller Ballast des Realistischen schwindet, und die untergegangenen Entdeckerwelten des vorletzten Jahrhunderts funkeln im irrwitzigen Licht der Millsschen Erzählkunst.