Unfortunates

B. S. Johnson (Bryan Stanley Johnson) (1933-1973) was an English experimental novelist, poet, literary critic and filmmaker. He was born into a working-class family, was evacuated from London during World War II, and left school at sixteen to work as an accountant. However, he taught himself Latin in the evenings, and with this knowledge, managed to pass the university exam for King's College London. After he graduated Johnson wrote a series of increasingly experimental and often acutely personal novels. A critically acclaimed film adaptation of the last of the novels published while he was alive, Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry was released in 2000. Increasingly depressed by his failure to succeed commercially, and beset by family problems, Johnson committed suicide. Jonathan Coe is a journalist who writes for the Guardian and the London Review of Books. He is the author of a biography of Humphrey Bogart and three novels.

"Far from some modernist stunt, the form of the book dovetails beautifully with Johnson’s subject–the accidental yet persistent nature of memory….This book, with no belief in God, no hope of heaven, makes you feel the stuff of life as sacred, and our inability to hold on to it as damnation enough for anyone to be made to bear."