Description
John Harvey is the prize-winning author of five highly acclaimed novels and four studies of clothes,colour, and illustration. He has reviewed widely, for the Sunday Times, the London Review of Books, and many others. Unusual in their scope and variety, his novels have tackled the asset-stripping that has devastated working communities; torture and resistance to a military dictatorship; family break-up in the world of road-haulage and motor-racing; a notorious love-crisis in the art-
world of the Victorians.
In the words of A.S. Byatt, his prose is poetic and incisive, while Anthony Thwaite described his work as ‘Tolstoyan’. Most recently he published Pax, a dual timeline novel about Rubens in London, and a fictional contemporary artist; Anita Desai said of this book that ‘’John Harvey, who is fascinated by the creative process involved in the making of art, finds the perfect subject in Rubens’ painting “Peace and War” and its themes that intrigue and inspire a contemporary English artist. The result is a many-layered novel, impressively skillful and deeply absorbing.’
Holland House Books is delighted to announce it is republishing all of John’s previous novels in print and digitally.
The Plate Shop (Collins/Fontana, 1979) Winner of the David Higham Prize for Fiction, shortlisted for the Hawthornden Prize and the Yorkshire Post Fiction Prize :
‘A powerful style, a strong visual sense and an impressive understanding of men who have to fight to survive.’ Daily Telegraph
‘Not merely unusual but also very good – precise, subtle, authoritative and unexpectedly exciting.’ HERMIONE LEE, Observer
‘How it holds, how it grips the attention . . . What we get here is a feeling about work . . .put across with a poetic realism . . First rate.’ Morning Star
‘Sheer verbal energy, delighting in the tones and textures of factory life’ Books and Bookmen
‘Harvey’s theme in his first novel is penetrating, his sense of drama impeccable and his language powerful.’ Time Out
‘A prose which is accomplished, poetic, incisive.’ A.S. BYATT, Times
‘The novel’s people are alive in a prose of precise passion.’ CHRISTOPHER RICKS, Sunday Times
‘An admirable first novel . . . pre-eminently a book for the times.’ THOMAS HINDE, Sunday Telegraph
