Howard Cunnell – författare

Five decades after it was first published, Jack Kerouac's seminal Beat novel On the Road finally finds its way to the big screen, in a production from award-winning director Walter Salles (Motorcycle Diaries) starring Sam Riley (Control, Brighton Rock), Garret Hedlund (Friday Night Lights), Kristen Stewart (Twilight), Kirsten Dunst, Amy Adams and Viggo Mortensen.This edition is transcribed from the original manuscript: hundreds of typed pages taped together by Kerouac to form a 'scroll', published word for word as it was originally composed.Sal Paradise (Sam Riley), a young innocent, joins his hero Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund), a traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat, on a breathless, exuberant ride back and forth across the United States. Their hedonistic search for release or fulfilment through drink, sex, drugs and jazz becomes an exploration of personal freedom, a test of the limits of the American dream. A brilliant blend of fiction and autobiography, Jack Kerouac's exhilarating novel swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, racing towards the sunset with unforgettable exuberance, poignancy and autobiographical passion. One of the most influential and important novels of the 20th century, On the Road is the book that launched the Beat Generation and remains the bible of that literary movement.'The most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as "beat"' The New York Times

When they were young men, Kim and his best friend, Garland Rain, travelled the world. They worked as dive guides, living free and easy by the sea. Garland is still out there, but Kim’s life is different now. He’s married and a father of three.Still longing for the freedom of the water, Kim agrees to help Garland run a one-time trip to the spectacular Brothers Islands in the Red Sea. What neither man expects is just how badly wrong it will go. Drugs and violence collide, and not everyone returns safely.Back on dry land, Kim finds that the decisions you make in the moment can come back to haunt you, even follow you home.

Was he thinking, do I have to be this kind of boy to survive? Is this what being a boy is?As a boy growing up on the south coast of England, Howard Cunnell's sense of self was dominated by his father's absence. Now, years later, he is a father, and his daughter is becoming his son.Starting with his own childhood in the Sussex beachlands, Howard tells the story of the years of self-destruction that defined his young adulthood and the escape he found in reading and the natural world. Still he felt compelled to destroy the relationships that mattered to him.Saved by love and responsibility, Cunnell charts his journey from anger to compassion, as his daughter Jay realizes he is a boy, and a son.Most of all, this is a story about love - its necessity and fragility, and its unequalled capacity to enable us to be who we are.Deeply thoughtful, searingly honest and exquisitely lyrical, Fathers & Sons is an exploration of fatherhood, masculinity, authenticity and family.

‘There is so much aching love in this book, such pain and beauty. Behold, and rejoice.’ – Tim Winton, author of CloudstreetWas he thinking, do I have to be this kind of boy to survive? Is this what being a boy is?As a boy growing up on the south coast of England, Howard Cunnell’s sense of self was dominated by his father’s absence. Now, years later, he is a father, and his daughter is becoming his son.Starting with his own childhood in the Sussex beachlands, Howard tells the story of the years of self-destruction that defined his young adulthood and the escape he found in reading and the natural world. Still he felt compelled to destroy the relationships that mattered to him.Saved by love and responsibility, Cunnell charts his journey from anger to compassion, as his daughter Jay realizes he is a boy, and a son.Most of all, this is a story about love – its necessity and fragility, and its unequalled capacity to enable us to be who we are.Deeply thoughtful, searingly honest and exquisitely lyrical, Fathers and Sons is an exploration of fatherhood, masculinity, authenticity and family.

'One of Britain's most distinctive and trustworthy voices ... A beautiful book' TIM WINTON'A book to lose yourself inside, and emerge from with enhanced clarity and wisdom' FRANCES WILSON'Tender and unflinching ... A masterclass in clarity and feeling' JIM CRACE'Cunnell writes with so much sensitivity to the sacredness of the everyday' SARA BAUMEA beautifully written, courageous and deeply moving journey from sorrow to acceptance, from loss to hope, shimmering with coastal light and hard-won wisdom.In Sun Country, Howard Cunnell returns to the southern England beachlands of his boyhood after the death of his mother.A love letter to the changing coast and sea, Sun Country is a book alive with light and shadow, where the white spaces between words are as charged with tension and power as the words themselves. It is a reckoning with the things we inherit – silence and absence, stories told and untold – and the transgression involved in turning a life into art. At the heart of the book is Gillian, his devoted single mother, and the small yet unforgettable details of her life that are woven into a powerful meditation on impermanence, grief, class and solitude.At once intimate and expansive, this luminous memoir traces one man’s journey from loss back towards life. Through stories about the writers and painters with whom he feels a kinship – including the English Romantics, W. H. Hudson and Agnes Martin – and the history of his own Sussex working-class family, Cunnell writes his way home to a place, to a culture and to himself as an artist.Cunnell’s descriptive power, so widely praised in his first memoir, reaches a new breathtaking level, with the simplicity that only comes from the finest craft and poetry.