books in order

Andrew Motion Books In Order

Pale Companion Books In Order

  1. The Pale Companion (1989)
  2. Famous for the Creatures (1991)

Novels

  1. The Invention of Dr Cake (2003)
  2. Silver (2012)
  3. The New World (2014)

Collections

  1. RED (2012)
  2. Coming in to Land (2017)

Anthologies edited

  1. New Writing: v. 2 (1993)
  2. New Writing: v. 3 (1994)
  3. Take 20 (1998)
  4. Babel (1999)
  5. Poetry in Public (2000)
  6. Firsthand (2001)
  7. Paper Scissors Stone (2002)
  8. Listen and Enjoy French Poetry (2003)
  9. Full of Star’s Dreaming (2003)
  10. The Poetry Quartets: v. 8 (2004)
  11. From Here to Eternity (2005)

Non fiction

  1. The Poetry of Edward Thomas (1980)
  2. Philip Larkin (1982)
  3. Elizabeth Bishop (1985)
  4. The Lamberts (1986)
  5. Keats (1997)
  6. Sarah Raphael: Strip! (1998)
  7. Wainewright the Poisoner (2000)
  8. William Barnes (2001)
  9. Interrupted Lives (2004)
  10. In the Blood (2006)
  11. Ways of Life (2007)

Pale Companion Book Covers

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Anthologies edited Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Andrew Motion Books Overview

The Invention of Dr Cake

Dr Cake is an unexceptional man. After a period of study and practice in London and several years spent travelling in Europe, he has chosen the life of a village doctor and lives quietly and alone. Why then, on the brass plate so ostentatiously screwed into his coffin lid, is there no name?

RED

A gorgeous new Cecelia mini book which contains two powerful and unforgettable short stories. Girl in the Mirror Lila knows how lucky she is to have found the man of her dreams. But when a secret from her family’s past comes to light on her wedding day, her destiny changes in the most unexpected of ways! The Memory Maker They say you never forget your first love. But what happens when those cherished memories start to fade? Some people would do anything to hold on to the past and, for one heartbroken man, that means finding a way to relive those precious moments!

The Poetry Quartets: v. 8

Audio Cassette, Bloodaxe Books Ltd

Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin is recognised as one of the most important writers to have emerged in Britain since the Second World War. First published in 1982, Andrew Motion’s study begins with an account of Larkin s life and literary background and discusses his literary relationship with Hardy and Yeats and his association with the Movement. He analyses Larkin s two novels and as*sesses his three mature collections. Throughout the book much reference is made to uncollected reviews and articles and occasionally to unpublished manuscripts. Rather than developing the familiar line on Larkin as an empirical and melancholy writer, Andrew Motion explores the Symbolist and transcendent element in his work, and emphasises its range and variety.

The Lamberts

A story of three generations destroyed by drink, drugs and bohemian life. George Lambert served as a war artist in Palestine and Gallipoli, and became Australia’s leading painter. His son Constant founded the Sadlers Wells ballet, and Kit Lambert managed the pop group, The Who, and was murdered.

Keats

Andrew Motion’s dramatic narration of Keats‘s life is the first in a generation to take a fresh look at this great English Romantic poet. Unlike previous biographers, Motion pays close attention to the social and political worlds Keats inhabited. Making incisive use of the poet’s inimitable letters, Motion presents a masterful account. ‘Motion has given us a new Keats, one who is skinned alive, a genius who wrote in a single month all the poems we cherish, a victim who was tormented by the best doctors of the age…
. This portrait, stripped of its layers of varnish and restored to glowing colours, should last us for another generation.’ Edmund White, The Observer Review’Keats‘s letters fairly leap off the page…
. Motion listens for the ‘freely associating inquiry and incomparable verve and dash,’ the ‘headlong charge,’ of Keats‘s jazzlike improvisations, which give us, like no other writing in English, the actual rush of a man thinking, a mind hurtling forward unpredictably and sweeping us along.’ Morris Dickstein, New York Times Book Review’Scrupulous and eloquent.’ Gregory Feeley, Philadelphia Inquirer’Brilliantly innovative, gripping, intricately researched, Motion’s biography does justice to its subject at last.’ John Carey, The Sunday Times’Engaging and convincing…
. The trajectory of this character from neglected and resentful child to arrogant and envious London dandy to sociopathic murderer on to an enfeebled, frightened prisoner is indelibly imagined and drawn.’ Edmund White, Financial Times’Motion crafts a fascinating tale as complex and compelling as if Wainewright himself had written it.’ Michael Spinella, Booklist’Thomas Griffiths Wainewright is a dream subject for either novelist or biographer…
. Andrew Motion, Britain’s poet laureate, clearly felt that neither straight biography nor pure fiction would do Wainewright’s complexities justice, and so he combined the two genres. The result is stunning. The central voice is that of Wainewright himself, reflecting back on his life. After each chapter Mr. Motion has added detailed notes that inform and flesh out the narrative, giving not only his own informed opinion of Wainewright’s actions but also those of Wainewright’s contemporaries and the scholars and writers who have studied him over the past two centuries.’ Lucy Moore, Washington Times’Did he kill his servant, and possibly others as well?…
The footnotes seem to say yes, but Wainewright adamantly argues his own case. Motion’s prose is flawless, and Wainewright’s voice is convincing. But in the long run, it’s this ambiguity that makes Wainewright the Poisoner a fascinating and memorable read.’ R.V. Schelde, Sacramento News and Review’Who could as for a better Romantic villain than Thomas Griffiths Wainewright?…
The book succeeds on many levels: as an act of ventriloquism, a work of scholarship, a psychological study, as a set of sharp portraits of famous men and an engrossing read…
.’ Polly Shulman, Newsday’Instead of a straightforward biography, Andrew Motion gives us Wainewright’s first person, fictionalized ‘confession.’ a document as circumspect, slyly reticent, and oeaginously smooth as the man himself. Splendid.’ John Banville, Literary Review’A genuine tour de force, and on a non fictional level, a telling portrait of a strange, intriguing and repellant man.’ Brian Fallon, Irish Times’A marvelous literary hybrid that totters with one foot in the world of nonfiction, the other in the land of make believe. One is alternatively swept up in Motion’s dizzy imaginative pastiche, or sent crashing into a dusty stack of scholarly cogitations…
.’ Philadelphia Inquirer’As true a portrait of a liar as its subject could wish. Rich and strange…
.’ Glasgow Herald

Wainewright the Poisoner

In a time rich in unlikely characters, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright 1794 1847 was one of the strangest of all. A painter, writer, well known London dandy and friend of most of the major figures of the Romantic era from Blake to Byron, from John Clare to John Keats, Lamb, De Quincey and Hazlitt, he was also almost certainly a murderer, possibly several times over. Arrested and convicted of forgery evidence was lacking to prove the murders he was transported for life to the barbarous penal colony of Tasmania, where, years later, he died in obscurity. Behind him he left only rumors and fragments of documents, and a legend of evil that fascinated such writers as Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. With a brilliant blend of creative imagination and scholarly sleuthing, Andrew Motion evokes Wainewright’s double life in a tour de force of the biographer’s art. Cast in the form of a partly fictional ‘confession’ written by the subject himself, buttressed and sometimes contradicted by the notes, background essays and other commentary setting out the known facts, it reveals the man as no straightforward history could do his distinctive voice, his wit and charm, his callousness and unreliability, his pathos and, perhaps, his capacity formurder. As a distinguished biographer of Philip Larkin and John Keats, among others, Andrew Motion has been notably successful in pinning down the often elusive details of Wainewright’s life. As a first rate poet he succeeded Ted Hughes as Britain’s Poet Laureate, he shows himself equally skilled in the imaginative investigation of Wainewright’s bizarre psyche. The result is a richly memorable exploration of the darker side of human nature, of the roots of crime, of the nature of biography itself.

Interrupted Lives

An original look at the literary reputations of some of our greatest writers whose lives and careers were cut short.

In the Blood

William Faulkner’s character Quentin in The Sound and the Fury repeatedly observes that ‘temporary’ is ‘the saddest word of all.’ Despair over human impermanence and the desire to preserve what has been known and felt, even grief, reverberate at the heart of British Poet Laureate Motion’s memoir of his childhood and adolescence in rural postwar England. A p an to his family, to the birds, brambles, and secret hollows of his beloved Hertfordshire and Essex, this memoir evokes with care, clarity, and detail, a whole world long disappeared. The book begins in the present tense in December of 1968, hours before the event that precipitated Motion’s desire to capture and preserve unchanged the life he had known heretofore: his mother’s foxhunting accident and subsequent coma from which she never recovers. ‘My childhood has ended suddenly. In a day,’ writes Motion at the close of the first chapter. ‘I want to lock into my head everything that’s happened in my life up to now, and make sure it never changes.’Whether recounting his first time salmon fishing with his father in Scotland, the horrors of prep school at the tender age of seven, or discovering Thomas Hardy and Bob Dylan, Motion imbues these recollections with the quicksilver emotions of the boy he was and the perceptions of the poet he would become; readers of his verse will recognize many of these experiences as the antecedents of the poems. Yet this memoir is far more than a guide to the life behind the poems; it is a stand against the ineluctability of time’s passing, an insistence that what has been ‘felt In the Blood, and felt along the heart,’ is, as the epigraph from Wordsworth suggests, an integral substance of our anatomy, a part that can be neither taken from us nor lost.

Related Authors

Leave a Comment