Book Launch: All My Precious Madness, by Mark Bowles

All My Precious Madness is the story of a man at odds with the world. A man who wants to escape his violent past but instead – most emphatically – repeats it.

The son of a policeman turned council worker, Henry Nash has hauled his way from a working class childhood in Bradford, through an undergraduate degree at Oxford, and into adulthood and an academic elite. But still, he can’t escape his anger. As the world – and men in particular – continue to disappoint him, so does his rage grow in momentum until it becomes almost rapturous. And lethal.

A savagely funny novel that disdains literary and moral conventions, All My Precious Madness is also a work of unusual care, craftsmanship and empathy – even if that also means understanding the darkest parts of humanity. It not only has the bite of Evelyn Waugh and Thomas Bernhard at their most acerbic – but also their intelligence.

Mark Bowles grew up between Bradford and Leeds and went on to study English at Liverpool and Oxford Universities. He currently lives in Brockley with his wife and two small children.