In the fast changing world of publishing, good writing is often overlooked, the emphasis on digital technology and the many new and exciting opportunities it offers.

We specialise in producing high quality printed books, in design and content over a wide range of subjects from fiction, poetry and art books. We are looking for good writers, whether new or established, offering them a close relationship with our editors, a service we consider of particular importance if high standards are to be maintained, whether for ebooks or printed books.

A Muswell Press title exists because it deserves publication.

James Boswell at the Tate

Jan Woolf reviews

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Bloomsbury Library

Leon Arden reviewed in the Jewish Chronicle, January 2012

Faber and Faber

Upcoming titles

The Day the Grass Came by Leo Aylen

Sons of Adam by Alan Mackie

Meanwhile...

Muswell Press is pleased to announce an agreement with Faber & Faber who will convert Muswell Press books to ebooks and distribute them internationally.

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Send an email with your MS detailing the genre, synopsis, approximate word count and working title of the work you are submitting along with five chapters that need not be consecutive.

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Email: info@muswell-press.co.uk

An entertaining, funny and powerful novel about a dysfunctional New York family forced to grapple with a profound question: do they dare take part in a decision involving the death of a loved one? Russell, the only son of Jacob and Beryl, becomes painfully aware, as he grows from childhood to adolescence, of his mother’s intellectual failings and his father’s need to control everyone around him. He makes his escape into a relationship with a beautiful young English girl. Their bliss is not to be. Jacob suffers a stroke, is paralysed and confined to a wheelchair. His life is unbearable and he begs Russell to help him end it. His son refuses but there is worse to come. Jacob tries to kill himself by a series of increasingly bizarre and desperate methods and Russell is forced to consider a move that could destroy his own life. This gripping novel deals with all the ramifications of euthanasia and how it impacts on a family, no matter what choices they make. Its theme is increasingly topical and although the book is suffused with comedy, it is both disturbing and uplifting.

It’s funny, touching, and ultimately both upsetting and moving. I was engrossed from start to finish. Deborah Moggach

This is not just a funny picture of a New York family. Nor is it just a serious book about assisted suicide. Because it is both, it is an enjoyable, indeed engrossing, read. Brian Clark

Comments on The Savage Place

A good novelist …with the eyes of an accurate, sensitive photographer and the ear of a poet. Boston Globe

A first novel of raw intensity and disturbing psychological impact. Saturday Review

An unusual book. The bed of love is The Savage Place where men and women meet in punishing antagonism... will be of interest to anyone who studies the patterns and attitudes of our contemporary culture. N.Y. Herald Tribune Book Review

Leon Arden is a New Yorker who has settled in England. He spent five years working as a free-lance photographer in the US, Mexico and Europe. He then turned to writing and his first four novels were published in the USA. The Walk to the Paradise Garden is his first to be originally published in England.

Much More of this Old Boy...? Scenes from a Reporter’s Life

In this equally entertaining and informative autobiography Peter Paterson gives an insider’s history of Fleet Street from the fifties to the present day.

Brought up in an orphanage and sent out at the age of 14 with just ten bob and a Bible, Peter Paterson enjoyed a front row-seat during a golden age of British politics.

His rambunctious memoir proves H.L. Mencken’s adage that news reporting offers more fun than any other calling.

Peter Paterson’s Sunny Stroll down the Old Street of Shame

I won’t get into the habit of writing about the elder statesmen of my trade, but having saluted Michael Kennedy last week, I cannot resist paying a tribute to one of his near contemporaries, Peter Paterson. Mr Paterson has marked his 80th birthday by publishing his memoirs, Much More of This, Old Boy? Scenes from a Reporter’s Life (Muswell Press, £12.99). They are quite wonderful, not merely for the romantic and charm-laden picture they paint of Fleet Street in the era before national newspapers were sent into what the author calls the “diaspora”, but for the remarkable way in which Mr Paterson describes his early life in an orphanage, and the discretion and good taste with which he deals with everything else. Read More Simon Heffer, Sunday Telegraph 1st March 2011

Peter Paterson has worked in national journalism since the 1950s. He has written for numerous papers and journals, including the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, the Spectator and the New Statesman.

He presented BBC’s radio’s The World Tonight and was the Daily Mail’s television critic.

He is the author of Tired and Emotional: The Life of Lord George Brown of which Simon Heffer wrote ‘Possibly the most entertaining book I have read in twenty-five years.’

From working for Field Marshal Montgomery, reporting Winston Churchill’s speeches and rubbing shoulders with the trade union barons, he witnessed a glittering cast of characters during the great days of Fleet Street. He reported on Chairman Mao’s China, Johnson’s America and Brezhnev’s Russia and was a star performer in the infamous Battle of El Vinos and a survivor of the Moorgate tube disaster.

Follow Me... A diary of love, loss and fine dining in a dying empire.

Joan Alexander’s father was a general and read poetry to her from an early age. As one of five siblings she was always creeping away to read in attics or hay lofts. In her early teens she passionately wanted to be an actress and went to Fay Compton’s Drama School. When she was offered a leading junior part in a film however, she was taken away from the school by her father, who only appreciated Shakespeare. She played lacrosse for the South of England and began to write short stories influenced by her love for Katherine Mansfield. She married a diplomat after World War 2, and wrote the novels which were to keep her writer’s spirit alive during a gruelling life of entertaining and diplomatic strain. Her work was usually placed in the country she was living in at the time, Aden, Cyprus, Nigeria, China, and Kenya. She now lives in London, where she is working on her fifteenth book.

It is the very early Sixties in suburban England. The Twist, the latest dance craze, has just arrived from America and is taking Britain by storm. Social conventions are under attack as never before as the waltz and foxtrot are barged aside by the invasion. In this new world of undreamed possibilities and terrified parents two thirteen-year-old boys, Danny and Oliver, find themselves the victims of an evil hoax by fellow pupils at the ballroom classes. With all the authority figures taking the side of the persecutors, the episode spirals out of control with tragic consequences that follow everyone down the years; none more so than Danny, whose life is given over to revenge.

This is a blazing and passionate story about the losing of innocence and the bitter gaining of adulthood. It is also a painfully acute account of a young man’s attempts to redeem himself from the ravages of guilt. In Franks’s darkly comic and beautifully made story, we meet a Dickensian gallery of the sinful and the saintly: the Gilberdykes, a nightmare family of civic snobs; Oliver’s extraordinary but difficult father, Benny Jacobs; the eccentric sculptor Seth Rawlings and countless others, each luminously brought to life by Franks’s poetic imagination. There are gilded entrepreneurs, divine musicians, pub shysters and middle-class vagrants in a teeming world that has seen off the upheavals of war but is now struggling with its own reinvention. As it makes its shocking and often farcical way towards the truth, The Sins of the Sons is not just a vivid social history of a fleeting time but also a profound study of what we pay to put the past in its place.

Alan Franks has been a long established feature writer for The Times and has interviewed many top figures in the world of music (Paul McCartney, Leonard Cohen, Stephen Sondheim, Yehudi Menuhin, Philip Glass, Ravi Shankar, Andre Previn); theatre/film (Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, Woody Allen, Mickey Rourke, Peter Hall, Jonathan Miller) and literature (Muriel Spark, James Baldwin, Elmore Leonard, Ian Rankin, Anthony Powell, Laurie Lee).

A collection of his Alan Franks’s Diary columns was published as a book, Real Life With Small Children Under Foot, which he read as a series on Radio 4. He has twice been nominated for a British Press Award.

Alan Franks’s previous novel, Boychester’s Bugle drew ecstatic reviews. The Times Literary Supplement called it “splendidly funny.” For Alan Hollinghurst in The Observer, it resembled Keith Waterhouse, while The Tablet saw similarities with Flann O'Brien and early Kingsley Amis. The veteran farceur Tom Sharpe found it “brilliantly comic.”

Going Over, a collection of short novels published in 2010 by Muswell Press opens with the winner of a national novella competition.

Franks is the author of many plays, including The Mother Tongue, which starred Prunella Scales and Gwen Taylor. (“English-Chekhov” wrote Sheridan Morley in The Spectator); The Edge of the Land, about the great floods of 1953, and Previous Convictions, a black domestic comedy about family duty and recession.

With the singer Patty Vetta he has released four albums of his songs, including The Wishfulness Waltz, which was recorded by the band Fairport Convention. He is currently collaborating as a lyricist with the saxophonist and composer Tim Whitehead who was current artist in residence in Tate Britain.

His poems have won several prizes, including the Wigtown Competition, Scotland’s largest. Unmade Roads, his most recent collection, includes his winning entries in the Plough and Petra Kenney competitions. He has been described, by the late John Rety, co-founder of Torriano Poetry, as “a modern day Sydney Carter.”

These stories are not only moving, funny and provocative: they are also deeply pertinent to our confused and confusing times. Lindsay Clarke

You have knowledge Adrian Mitchell

Jan Woolf has a sexy, vigorous imagination and the art to realise all her good ideas. I love her writing. Edmund White

Witty, poignant and penetrating, Jan Woolf’s stories - or fugues, as she likes to think of them - take the reader on an episodic journey through the linked lives of children and adults in a London Pupil Referral Unit. From a Hackney towpath to a day trip to Albania, she covers subjects as disparate as physics, communism and pornography. Read separately they are a delight - read sequentially they chart the developing relationship between two adults, themselves struggling with interior lives not unlike the children they attempt to educate in a contemporary climate of cant and management speak. Images of sculptures by Richard Niman accompany the stories, acting as dramatic visual stepping stones between them.

Jan Woolf is a painter, writer, producer and reviewer. She has also spent many years as a special needs teacher living a parallel life as a political activist. Her brief time as a film censor provided rich material for her first play Porn Crackers directed by Ruth Boswell and produced at the Hackney Empire in 2009 - where she currently holds the first Harold Pinter writers residency.

Mike Dibb has been producing and directing films for television for many years on subjects ranging from cinema and jazz to art, sport, literature and popular culture. These include several collaborations with the writer John Berger, in particular the hugely influential BBC series and book Ways of Seeing (BAFTA Award 1972). His other documentaries include The Spirit of Lorca (Gold Award NY Festival of Film and TV 1989), The Fame and Shame of Salvador Dali, and What’s Cuba Playing At? (on the Afro-Spanish roots of Cuban music), two films on Spain’s great cultural archetypes In Pursuit of Don Juan and The Further Adventures of Don Quixote, and three themed series on the contrasting subjects of ‘Play’, ‘Time’ and ‘Latin-American Culture’. With Stephen Frears, he co-directed Typically British, the long BFI/C 4 documentary on the history of British cinema. The Miles Davis Story, his two hour film for Channel 4 about the legendary jazz trumpeter (available on a SONY DVD), received The UK’s Royal Philharmonic Society TV award and an International EMMY in New York as arts documentary of the year 2001. His most recent feature-length documentaries, also out on DVD, include Tango Maestro - the life and music of Astor Piazzolla (106' BBC/Opus Arte), Keith Jarrett - the art of improvisation (84' C 4/EuroArts) and Edward Said - the last interview ( 206' ICA). Spellwell is his first book. www.mikedibb.co.uk

Franks’ first full collection of poems is a rich mixture of wit and lyricism. His style ranges from exquisite miniatures to ambitious narratives which breathe new life into the English ballad form. Here too are parodies of and tributes to such masters as John Donne, Matthew Arnold, John Clare and Philip Larkin. These poems display a mastery of style and an unfailing ear for the harmonies and discords of human affairs.

Poetry of great musicality. Jo Shapcott, president of the Poetry Society

A modern day Sydney Carter John Rety, co-founder of Torriano Poetry

...worthy of Shelley. Franks is the genuine thing. Professor Ross Woodman, author of The Apocalyptic Vision in the Poetry of Shelley

Alan Franks has been a long established feature writer for The Times and has interviewed many top figures in the world of music (Paul McCartney, Leonard Cohen, Stephen Sondheim, Yehudi Menuhin, Philip Glass, Ravi Shankar, Andre Previn); theatre/film (Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, Woody Allen, Mickey Rourke, Peter Hall, Jonathan Miller) and literature (Muriel Spark, James Baldwin, Elmore Leonard, Ian Rankin, Anthony Powell, Laurie Lee).

A collection of his Alan Franks’s Diary columns was published as a book, Real Life With Small Children Under Foot, which he read as a series on Radio 4. He has twice been nominated for a British Press Award.

Alan Franks’s previous novel, Boychester’s Bugle drew ecstatic reviews. The Times Literary Supplement called it “splendidly funny.” For Alan Hollinghurst in The Observer, it resembled Keith Waterhouse, while The Tablet saw similarities with Flann O'Brien and early Kingsley Amis. The veteran farceur Tom Sharpe found it “brilliantly comic.”

Going Over, a collection of short novels published in 2010 by Muswell Press opens with the winner of a national novella competition.

Franks is the author of many plays, including The Mother Tongue, which starred Prunella Scales and Gwen Taylor. (“English-Chekhov” wrote Sheridan Morley in The Spectator); The Edge of the Land, about the great floods of 1953, and Previous Convictions, a black domestic comedy about family duty and recession.

With the singer Patty Vetta he has released four albums of his songs, including The Wishfulness Waltz, which was recorded by the band Fairport Convention. He is currently collaborating as a lyricist with the saxophonist and composer Tim Whitehead who was current artist in residence in Tate Britain.

His poems have won several prizes, including the Wigtown Competition, Scotland’s largest. Unmade Roads, his most recent collection, includes his winning entries in the Plough and Petra Kenney competitions. He has been described, by the late John Rety, co-founder of Torriano Poetry, as “a modern day Sydney Carter.”

Going Over - The winner of the New Writer Magazine National Novella Competition

In Franks’ gripping psychological novella about memory and forgiveness, a man walks across the wild moorland in the north of England for a meeting with his estranged and ancient father. He is re-treading the ground the two of them strode together nearly forty years before, and trying to piece together the circumstances of his mother's death. Was she the victim of her own excesses, or did his father have a hand in it? Must he be thought of as a murderer? As he ponders these things England is in the grip of a drought and the ruins of the old Cumbrian village of Mardale, flooded before the war to create a reservoir for Manchester, are slowly inching back into view as the water subsides. Will fresh answers to his own pressing questions be delivered by this re-emergence of the past? In the same volume are The Tarnished Muse, a wicked satire on the theatre and the press, and The Night Everything Happened, a riotous comedy about a young man out of control in London.

What reviewers said about Franks’ Novel Boychester’s Bugle:

Brilliantly comic. Novelist Tom Sharpe

A very funny blackish comedy about the introduction of new technology. Alan Hollinghurst, The Observer

Sharply satirical ... a sting in every paragraph. Times Literary Supplement

Alan Franks writes now in the style of Flann O’Brien, now in that of the young Kingsley Amis ... a very odd, brave novel. The Tablet

Alan Franks has been a long established feature writer for The Times and has interviewed many top figures in the world of music (Paul McCartney, Leonard Cohen, Stephen Sondheim, Yehudi Menuhin, Philip Glass, Ravi Shankar, Andre Previn); theatre/film (Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, Woody Allen, Mickey Rourke, Peter Hall, Jonathan Miller) and literature (Muriel Spark, James Baldwin, Elmore Leonard, Ian Rankin, Anthony Powell, Laurie Lee).

A collection of his Alan Franks’s Diary columns was published as a book, Real Life With Small Children Under Foot, which he read as a series on Radio 4. He has twice been nominated for a British Press Award.

Alan Franks’s previous novel, Boychester’s Bugle drew ecstatic reviews. The Times Literary Supplement called it “splendidly funny.” For Alan Hollinghurst in The Observer, it resembled Keith Waterhouse, while The Tablet saw similarities with Flann O'Brien and early Kingsley Amis. The veteran farceur Tom Sharpe found it “brilliantly comic.”

Going Over, a collection of short novels published in 2010 by Muswell Press opens with the winner of a national novella competition.

Franks is the author of many plays, including The Mother Tongue, which starred Prunella Scales and Gwen Taylor. (“English-Chekhov” wrote Sheridan Morley in The Spectator); The Edge of the Land, about the great floods of 1953, and Previous Convictions, a black domestic comedy about family duty and recession.

With the singer Patty Vetta he has released four albums of his songs, including The Wishfulness Waltz, which was recorded by the band Fairport Convention. He is currently collaborating as a lyricist with the saxophonist and composer Tim Whitehead who was current artist in residence in Tate Britain.

His poems have won several prizes, including the Wigtown Competition, Scotland’s largest. Unmade Roads, his most recent collection, includes his winning entries in the Plough and Petra Kenney competitions. He has been described, by the late John Rety, co-founder of Torriano Poetry, as “a modern day Sydney Carter.”

A London house. A warren of rooms. The tenants refusing to budge. A gallery of characters presided over by the extraordinary transvestite Freddie Parts. He enlists the help of a young man who lives in the basement with a beautiful rich wife. A comic novel of wit, character and language.

He has written a very funny book. Connaughton, like Tom Sharpe, catches the madness of the annoyed. He is a fine writer and observer bathed in humanity and love. Illtyd Harrington - Camden New Journal

Every page harbours a poetic phrase or image. At its astringently sad best Big Parts is big art. Brian Lynch - Irish Independent

Shane Connaughton has won the George Devine Award, Royal Court Theatre, London, The Hennessy Literary Award, The London Irish Post Award. His first novel A Border Station was short-listed for The GPA Literary Award. He was nominated for an Academy Award for the film My Left Foot.

Science or pseudo-science? Art form or the graphics of biology? Encyclopedia of Optography is a fusion of art book and academic anthology, gathering together for the first time a collection of essays by some of the only writers on the subject.

Optography - a method for extracting and temporarily ‘fixing’ the last imprinted image on the retina at the moment of death. An archaic method shrouded in myth, yet was an early hope for forensic science.

A condemned young man, two scientists, Jack the Ripper, Salvador Dali and the only known human optogram are crucial leads explored here in the quest to uncover the truth and fascination behind the myth.

Encyclopedia of Optography is an art book and an anthology on the subject with contributors like Dr. Evangelos Alexandridis, probably the only person alive to have produced optograms in the 20th century. This extended and re-edited volume coincides with Derek Ogbourne's collaboration with The British Optical Association Museum, September 2008.

Derek Ogbourne studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London (1983-1989) and has exhibited extensively in the UK and abroad. Exhibitions include What Make You, What Makes You at the South London Gallery, Space International, Valencia, Spain and Museum of Optography at the Brigitte Schenk Gallery, Cologne.

Ogbourne's work is powered by the frenetic and exhilarating ongoing plot of big themes: physical life, death, violence, beauty and the sublime; landscape and vision. Pulsing with the strengths and frailties of what it is like to be human, his obsessive preoccupations result in deeply complex, emotionally engaging artworks. He is best known for video works such as Gravity and Others, Struggle and Magic Mountain. Ogbourne’s latest works range from his cinematic piece Death and the Monument and Flesh - to his clinically sublime photographs of dissected cows eyes and recent series of large sensitive landscape drawings.

Frederick Douglass was a towering figure of the nineteenth century. Vitally involved in every major struggle for social change in the United States, from the abolition of slavery to the campaign for women’s suffrage, he gave his life to the cause of making the world a better place. In his mid-20s he wrote the first version of his autobiography, describing his life as a slave and his escape. He journeyed to Britain, to argue the case for a global campaign against slavery and to escape the manhunters who were searching for ‘their master’s property’. He arrived just as one of the great disasters of the century, the famine in Ireland, was starting and at a moment when the Chartist movement was active.

Riversmeet imagines Frederick Douglass’ reactions to these events, and sets his story alongside that of an Irish man caught in the horrors of the famine. As their paths cross and separate the two of them try to decide how to try to change the world. They meet again as a political solution is springing into life.

Richard Bradbury has been a university teacher since 1980s, including a stint for the British Council in Poland - teaching American cultural studies, literature, film and theatre. In 1998 he was diagnosed as suffering from a severe case of sarcoidosis, leaving him with serious and chronic health problems. The enforced stillness made him re-consider what it was he wanted to really do. Riversmeet was a product of that, and he is grateful to Maureen Casey and Deirdre Rogers for supporting the writing, to Ruth Boswell for editing, and to Jan Woolf for championing it and commissioning the play Become a Man, about Frederick Douglass’ visit to Britain in the 1840s, performed at London’s City Hall and the Hackney Empire as part of the commemorations for the bi-centenary of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007. Richard has since written two more plays; Claude, about the poet Claude McKay, and Leaving, about contemporary British rural life and he is at present working on a new play Blood Meadow about the Western Rebellion of 1549. He is also completing a companion volume to Riversmeet, set in the same period, and another novel set in the South West of England. He continues to teach literature and film for the Open University and the Workers Educational Association, and is chair of Kaleido, an arts and disability charity based in the South West.

James Boswell left his native New Zealand in 1925 to study painting in London at the Royal College of Art but was soon in the vanguard of the young intellectuals who belonged to the radical movement. By the early thirties he had given up painting and devoted himself exclusively to the struggle against Nazism in Europe and fascism at home. Satirical drawings and cartoons poured from his pen, appearing in The Daily Worker, The Daily Mirror, pamphlets and propaganda. In 1933 he was a founder member of The Artists International Association (AIA) In 1936 he began work in the design studio of the Asiatic Oil Company (now Shell Oil). He was called up in 1941 as a private in the RAMC and trained as a radiographer. He drew extensively scenes from army life. 1943 saw him in Iraq where he filled his sketchbooks (now in the possession of The Tate Gallery, The British Museum and the Imperial War Museum) with luminous desert scenes, the daily life of the soldier and with a remarkable set of passionate anti-war drawings, the peak of his work as a satirical artist.

In 1947 Boswell became Art Editor of Lilliput. Richard Bennett was editor. Together they produced a magazine that has remained unique, gathering round them a group of talented artists and writers - Ronald Searle, John Minton, André François, Gerard Hoffnung, James Fitton and James Holland, Edward Ardizzone, Paul Hogarth, Quentin Blake and many others. He had returned to painting and, in 1951, was commissioned to paint a huge mural in the Festival of Britain's Sea and Ships Pavilion. For the remainder of his life he concentrated on painting, held many exhibitions and illustrated books and record sleeves. 1967 saw a large exhibition at the Commonwealth Institute. In 1970 Boswell was commissioned by British Petroleum to paint a mural for their new building in Wellington, NZ. It is called The Golden Day and is now hanging in the Palmerston North Art College, New Zealand. Its five panels follow the passing of the day, from dusk to evening. It is his last work. For more information go to www.jboswell.info.

William Feaver. b 1942, painter, writer, critic, formerly of The Listener, Sunday Times and, for many years, The Observer. His Pitmen Painters was the basis for Lee Hall’s The Pitmen Painters, first staged in Newcastle, then at the National Theatre, London It is going on to New York, Seuil and elsewhere. Most recent books, since Boswell, have been on Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach.

Out of Time is a passionate and violent story set in a primitive parallel world into which Joe Harding, a 17 year old boy, is catapulted. He has to survive against a cruel tyrant who has enslaved his country. He finds shelter among a hidden band of dissidents and has his first passionate love affair with one of the girls who finally sacrifices her life for him. Joe heads a rebellion against the tyrant and liberates the country. In the final fight he is attacked and finds himself back on his own planet. The two years he has been away - although only a few minutes in his own time - are a rites of passage which changes him utterly and forever.

I have to say that Out of Time stands proudly on my shelf of favourites. It is an extraordinary book, beautifully written and psychologically stimulating. To me it reflects aspects of humanity in a raw, sometimes provocative and honest way that evokes many emotions...an adventure, a real treasure of a book, one not to be missed! Elaine Beard, Amazon

Ruth Boswell’s career has been largely as a producer in TV and film production. She worked at the BBC for eight years, producing major TV series with actors such as Juliet Stevenson, Patrick Stewart, Michael Kitchen and Kenneth Branagh. This was followed by four highly successful series of The Chief for Anglia TV starring Martin Shaw and Tim Piggott Smith. In 1995 she co-produced, with the director Peter Yates, a feature film for Hollywood, A Run of the Country by Shane Connaughton starring Albert Finney. She adapted Catherine Storr’s famous children’s book Marianne Dreams for TV. This was followed by a children’s novel, Emmy published by Routledge & Kegan Paul and read on Jackanory by Hayley Mills. She co-wrote, with Francis Kennett, a book about slavery Antigua. An option to make a feature film was bought by the BBC. In 2005 Muswell Press published her novel Out of Time. She is now writing the second volume to be published in 2011.