Richard Francis – författare

Fans of Jonathan Coe will love this extraordinary panoramic novel, which turns upon the whirligig of life that is Costford, a North Western town, in 1970.Costford, a brash north of England town. It's 1970 and young Trevor Morgan has a magical smile and large ambitions. But his marriage is in crisis, and he seeks help from an unexpected quarter: feisty middle-aged May Rollins. May is feeling the stress of living with the demented mother she has always hated. Strange things start happening: she spots a lollipop lady at eight o'clock on an August evening; her TV converts to colour of its own accord; and mother takes to wandering off, with murderous intent, when the minder, May's stepdaughter Cherry, is not looking.May and Trevor are political enemies, at odds over a controversial plan to build council flats at Prospect Hill, but their relationship takes a shocking – and ambiguous – twist. Meanwhile Art Whiteside, a predatory estate agent who believes in true love, complicates affairs on both town and home fronts.With dazzling ingenuity, Richard Francis catches the whirligig of urban life at the very moment when contemporary society was struggling into being. His comic and poignant novel conjures up the fumbled negotiations we make between our public and private lives, evoking the pain and pleasure of husbands, wives, and lovers, of parents and children – and depicting a personal and communal quest for the meaning of home.

New England Transcendentalism was a vibrant and many-sided movement whose members are probably best remembered for their utopian experiments, their attempts to reconcile the contingent world of history with what they perceived as the stable and patterned world of nature. Richard Francis has written the first book to explore in detail the ideological basis of the three famous experiments during the 1840s: Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Henry David Thoreau's "community of one" on the shores of Walden Pond.Francis suggests that at the heart of Transcendentalism was a belief that all phenomena are connected in a repetitive sequence. The task was to explain how human society could be reordered to benefit from this seriality. Some members of the movement believed in evolutionary progress, whereas others hoped to be the agents of a sudden millennial transformation. They differed, as well, in their views as to whether the fundamental social unit was the individual, the family, the phalanstery, or the community. The story of the three communities was, inevitably, also the story of particular individuals, and Francis highlights the lives and ideas of such leaders as George Ripley, W. H. Channing, Bronson Alcott, Charles Lane, and Theodore Parker. The consistent underlying beliefs of the New England Transcendentalists have exerted a powerful influence on American intellectual and cultural history ever since.

New England Transcendentalism was a vibrant and many-sided movement whose members are probably best remembered for their utopian experiments, their attempts to reconcile the contingent world of history with what they perceived as the stable and patterned world of nature. Richard Francis has written the first book to explore in detail the ideological basis of the three famous experiments during the 1840s: Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Henry David Thoreau's "community of one" on the shores of Walden Pond.Francis suggests that at the heart of Transcendentalism was a belief that all phenomena are connected in a repetitive sequence. The task was to explain how human society could be reordered to benefit from this seriality. Some members of the movement believed in evolutionary progress, whereas others hoped to be the agents of a sudden millennial transformation. They differed, as well, in their views as to whether the fundamental social unit was the individual, the family, the phalanstery, or the community. The story of the three communities was, inevitably, also the story of particular individuals, and Francis highlights the lives and ideas of such leaders as George Ripley, W. H. Channing, Bronson Alcott, Charles Lane, and Theodore Parker. The consistent underlying beliefs of the New England Transcendentalists have exerted a powerful influence on American intellectual and cultural history ever since.

A US Marine is chosen by the Agency for a mission that goes awry. His path takes him through finding love in a war zone into slavery and death matches in the gladiator pits of Southeast Asia. On the way he discovers a secret government project that changed his life forever but made it possible for him to survive. Based on a true story.

“[Francis] is just so good at the transcription and transformation of everyday ordinary life, all seen from sideways on, so that everything becomes so strange and so funny.”–Tessa HadleyAn elderly academic is accosted by a homeless woman on his way home from the cinema. She tells him her name is Laura. So begins a nightmarish journey for Gerald, who is forced to confront the mystery of his own past and to ask himself if he has lived a good life – or even a decent one.In the course of this very funny, sometimes disturbing and often moving novel, suppressed memories return to haunt him, including the question of the role he played in a family tragedy. Above all he has to assess the harm he may have done in a long-forgotten love affair.Those close to him suddenly appear unfathomable as he begins to question if he truly knows those closest to him and even himself.The problem with exploring the past, Gerald begins to see, is that there are an infinite number of ways to travel through it.