Private Schools and the Ruin of England

Sad Little Men

The revealing book about the world that shaped Boris Johnson

Inside the secretive world that shaped Boris Johnson

Definitive and brilliantly expressed

Dazzling in its anger and the force of its argument

A sensitive and incisive analysis of the British class system...insanely readable

One of the finest polemics I have ever come across... Sad Little Men has been an eye-opener

A sensitive and incisive analysis of the British class system has no right to be as insanely readable and enjoyable as this book manages to be

Engaging and readable, powerful and cogent. A vivid portrait of the political elite exposed for the vulnerable men/ children they are

Joy Schaverien, author of Boarding School Syndrome

If you want to understand the aura of entitlement and untouchability shrouding our governing class, look no further than Beard's witty, unsparingly sharp and deeply moving anatomy of the emotional culture of England's boarding schools

Utterly compelling, top proper stuff. I loved it to bits. The energy of it! I really felt for them (all) by the end

Ian Marchant, Author of A Hero for High Times

Really good, clever, dazzling in its anger and the force of its argument

[A] brilliant book... Beard's breathtaking personal account of the British habit of the British habit of institutionalising elite children captures all the nuances and subtleties of the boarder's undoing and its lasting legacy into adulthood

Richard Beard is the author of Acts of the Assassins, which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, and most recently the memoir The Day That Went Missing, which was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, the James Tait Black Prize and won the PEN Ackerley Prize. In the United States the book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. 
 
In the twenty years since his first book, he has published critically acclaimed novels and narrative non-fiction, including Becoming Drusilla, the story of how a friendship between two men was changed by a gender transition. 
 
He has served as a judge for Canada's Giller Prize and for the BBC and Costa Short Story Awards, and is a dour opening batsman for the Authors Cricket Club.

'Read this book' Alastair Campbell 
 
'A really wonderful book' Nigella Lawson via Twitter 
 
In 1975 Richard Beard was sent away to boarding school. So were Boris Johnson and David Cameron. 
 
He didn't enjoy it. But the first and most important lesson was not to let that show. 
 
A public school education has long been accepted in Britain as a preparation for leadership, but being separated from your parents at a young age is traumatic. What sort of adult does it mould? Tackling debates about privilege head-on, Sad Little Men reveals what happens when you put a succession of men from boarding schools into positions of influence, including at 10 Downing Street, and asks the question: is this really who we want in charge? 
 
'The most important book I've read this year' Adam Rutherford

How to Beat the Australians

Richard Beard's brilliant follow-up to Muddied Oafs - a comic quest to beat the Australians at their own games...

An extremely funny part-travelogue, part-self-discovery and part-investigation into how the 53rd most populous country became world beaters.

Beard clearly saved England in 2005. Where the bloody hell is he now?

There's something peculiarly English about going to Australia to take on the locals at every sport imaginable just for the sake of undermining their arrogance, athletic prowess and over-achievement. But Beard does this with dry humour and aplomb.

Richard Beard’s most recent book is Acts of the Assassins, which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. 
 
In the twenty years since his first book he has published critically acclaimed novels and narrative non-fiction, including Becoming Drusilla, the story of how a friendship between two men was changed by a gender transition. 
 
He was formerly Director of the National Academy of Writing in London, and is now a Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo and has a Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia. He is an optimistic opening batsman for the Authors Cricket Club.

'Feeling the way I do now, it's not a feeling I ever want to have again.' Andrew Flintoff speaks for a nation. 
 
The Ashes, 2006/07: Australia 5 England 0. The nightmare returns. 
 
For twenty years, Australia has produced competitors so gritty they order sandwiches with sand in, and not just at cricket. Fourth in the medals table at the Athens Olympics, Tour de France contenders, Davis Cup champions, and the Socceroos 3--1 winners over England. For Richard Beard, the football was the last straw. 
 
So, on the well-established principle that if you want something doing ..., he travelled down to Australia for seven rounds of hand-to-hand sporting combat, to find out just what makes the Australians so good, and how to beat them.

Damascus

'One of the most ingenious, resourceful and entertaining novelists in England' Philip Hensher

Beard is a talented writer, crafting many scenes with luminous precision

Damascus recounts a day in the life of young lovers Spencer and Hazel, 1 November 1993. It's the day they finally meet again after years communicating only by phone. It's also the day that they appear, at various points throughout the book, to be aged 10, 13, 18 or 21 or indeed, in the opening chapter, zero. It may spoil the novel to give away its ending

The climactic showdown is not only an apt marriage of the novel's form and content-but also gently comic, the characteristic tone of this undertaking. Ludic in a peculiarly British manner-An assured achievement

'Like Nick Hornby and Jonathan Coe, beard comically unhinges style, character and point of view to tell us that indeed we are in the chaos of the contemporary world'

A love story, in which all the events, people and places are taken from the contents of the "The Times" of 1st November, 1993. 
 
'It's the last day of the holidays and Spencer Kelly (12) wants to hold Hazel Burns (12) by the hand. This is the meaning of life. He wants to sit beside her on a sand dune and hold her hand and then kiss her. Just kissing, in a nice way, on her cheek perhaps and then a little bit at the top of her arms- If he can kiss her this once then he'll always have kissed her, and everything which follows will be different. It's to be the one moment which instantly changes everything.'

Dry Bones

The definitive novel about celebrity grave-robbing: completely original, very black, and very funny.

Excellent-Beard is a hugely playful novelist-Dry Bones is scabrous and profane, but also very human in a good way, and probably a little bit profound too

A roller-coaster philosophical journey of Stoppard-like brilliance-Combining angst and farce in equal measure, Dry Bones is a very English comedy: Graham Greene meets David Lodge

One of the most ingenious, resourceful and entertaining novelists in England

'Richard Beard's prose is dry, nonchalant and fluent'

Jay Mason is experiencing a crisis of faith. 
 
Disillusioned with his calling as a Deacon in the Anglican Church of Geneva, and estranged from his pregnant girlfriend, he's about to fall into the murky world of celebrity grave-robbing. His church has been bought by the shadowy antiquities dealer Joseph Moholy, who arrives to claim its most interesting asset: the toe bone of Thomas Becket. Moholy has a large collection of dubiously acquired relics and is keen to add to his collection. Jay, he decides, is the man to assist him. Jay finds that grave-robbing can be both lucrative and thrilling, however morally troubling for a man of God, and in Switzerland's cemeteries he finds a rich cast to work on: James Joyce, Richard Burton, John Calvin and Charlie Chaplin all receive his midnight attentions. But Moholy is a ruthless man whose ambitions are perilously high, and as Jay assists him in his search for the holy grail of relics, he puts himself and his loved ones in serious danger.

The Day That Went Missing

A memoir of exceptional power and universal relevance – about loss, carrying on, and recovering a brother's life and death.

A memoir of real truth and heartbreaking emotional heft

This captivating book, both heart-rending and jaw-dropping, unfolds like a detective story

A touching, painful disquisition on memory and forgetting and the tendrils that tie us to the past

Clear-eyed, very sad, funny at times and, despite the story it tells, ultimately uplifting in its determination to confront buried truths.

A devastating forage into memory and the brutality of the stiff upper lip

What a wonderful book about tragedy, the tricks that memory plays on us all, and the bottomless capacity for denial that lies at the heart of a public school upbringing. I was quite undone by it - and also surprised, at times, by eruptions of laughter. For it proves, if proof is needed, that there's nothing stranger than a conventional English family

A compelling autobiography showing the need to erase an early tragedy and the necessity, many years later, to discover what exactly happened. This is an unforgettable family story that explores human nature and involves us all

I read nothing this year that I admired quite as much

This is an absorbing, unsettling and at times painfully difficult read but by the end of the book it is clear that Richard found it cathartic to dig up the past. His story is an important examination of grief and denial and the huge damage caused by the idea that feelings and emotions are something best packed away and ignored

Jorge Semprun could not speak of what he had witnessed when he was released in April 1945 after 18 months in the death camp at Buchenwald… Richard Beard is scissored from Semprun’s cloth… As he proves time and time again in The Day That Went Missing, a wonderful memoir in which he writes himself back to life, the language does exist to make sense of grief. His book deserves to stand on the same shelf as William Fienne’s The Music Room, as a remarkable homage to a lost brother

A moving, harrowing tale that is artfully told

This brave, necessary memoir finds Beard struggling to bring the facts back to the surface… Some people still think it best to “move on” from trauma quickly, with minimal discussion. Beard’s book shows the price we pay for that illusion of movement is, emotionally, never to move on at all

One of the most impressive things about this most impressive book is Beard’s anxiety is that without the tragedy he would never have become a writer… Beard’s is a book about forgetting, about a very particular amnesia of sorrow. Beard is one of our most accomplished authors, and this is perhaps his most readerly book, in that it is all about decoding and deciphering, interpreting and imagining. But it is also just stricken. When he, eventually after nigh on 40 years, first cries on the beach, I dare the reader not to do so as well

This memoir breaks all the rules. It’s brimful of anger and guilt, fails to deliver an uplifting ending and opens with a death… Beard has written an enriching rather than uplifting book

Beard’s book is a belated attempt to confront the truths he had previously repressed, and it makes for both painful and riveting reading… The talent he foregrounds here is ultimately that of keeping emotion at bay – the devastating product of a scalpel-sharp intellect and an English boarding school education

The Day That Went Missing is a book about a family tragedy that has the momentum of his brother’s life. It also has something of the mystery and intrigue of a metaphysical quest, since it is an attempt to capture the essence of someone long dead… Written in pellucid prose and artfully constructed, The Day That Went Missing is never sentimental or self-pitying and is all the more moving as a consequence… An act of love which honours and memorialises the brother he lost so traumatically

A family story of exceptional power and universal relevance

It is more than just a study on grief, exploring memory and the savagery of the stiff upper lip. No book has moved me more this year

It is written in a searingly honest way and is quite unlike any other book I’ve ever read.

In this haunting and courageous memoir, Beard at last confronts the events of the day his brother died.

A compelling story, finely written and forensic in its search for truth... This account of one family's tragedy is a haunting story that lingers long in the memory

Richard Beard is the author of Acts of the Assassins which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and most recently, The Day That Went Missing. In the twenty years since his first book he has published critically acclaimed novels and narrative non-fiction, including Becoming Drusilla, the story of how a friendship between two men was changed by a gender transition. He was formerly director of the National Academy of Writing in London, and is now a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo and has a Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia. He is an optimistic opening batsman for the Authors Cricket Club.

*WINNER OF THE PEN ACKERLEY PRIZE 2018* 
 
My younger brother’s name is Nicholas Beard. He was nine years old, and I was with him in the water when he drowned. 
 
Life changes in an instant. 
 
On a family holiday in Cornwall in 1978, Richard and Nicholas are in the sea, jumping the waves. Suddenly and inexplicably Nicholas is out of his depth and then, shockingly, so is Richard. Only one of the brothers returns to the shore. 
 
Richard does not attend Nicholas’s funeral and afterwards the family return to Cornwall to continue the holiday. Soon they stop speaking of that day at the beach altogether. Years later, haunted by grief, Richard sets out to piece together the story. Who was Nicholas? What really happened that day? And why did the family never speak of it again? 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2018 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE 2018 
 
‘This captivating book, both heart-rending and jaw-dropping, unfolds like a detective story’ Daily Mail 
 
‘A memoir of real truth and heartbreaking emotional heft’ Sunday Times

Acts of the Assassins

A charismatic cult leader is dead. One by one his followers are being assassinated. Sawn in half, beheaded, skinned alive. Enter Gallio.

Brilliantly original and absurdly compelling ... it’s a book you’ll read in one, frantic gasp

Richard Beard is one of those rare writers whose novels are at once radically inventive and brilliantly entertaining. Acts of the Assassins … is as joyously original as it is a page-turner to read

The Acts of the Assassins is…spectacularly successful. It is thoughtful and clever and brutal and true… It is a Chinese puzzle box of a novel. A garden of forking paths. A page-turner. A modern classic

Extraordinarily funny...confident and enchanting

It is a darkly funny, virtuoso performance… so cleverly done it almost winks at the reader

Controversial, thought-provoking, funny and challenging, Acts of the Assassin is a delightfully fantastic and utterly compelling tale

One of the strangest and most interesting novels written this century… Brave and gripping novel

This novel takes a circular saw to received ideas about belief, fate, will, and storytelling. It’s also very funny

Richard Beard is one of those rare writers whose novels are at once radically inventive and brilliantly entertaining

One of this year’s most gripping and unusual thrillers

A superior literary crime novel, and a highly unorthodox historical novel...Endlessly entertaining

[Richard Beard has] slicded New Testament history with Le Carre-style espionage

SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 
 
A charismatic cult leader is dead. One by one his followers are being assassinated. Enter Gallio. 
 
Gallio does counter-insurgency. But the theft of a body he’s supposed to be guarding ruins his career. Years later, the file is reopened when a second body appears. Gallio is called back by headquarters and ordered to track down everyone involved the first time round. The only problem is they keep dying, in ever more grotesque and violent ways. How can Gallio stay ahead of the game when the game keeps changing?

Lazarus Is Dead

Meet Lazarus - hero of the best story about second chances ever told

As gripping as a thriller and endlessly thought-provoking... Surprising, spellbinding, witty and utterly original

Lazarus is Dead is a delightful falsehood - a brilliant novel and a shining example of the gospel untruth

This clever and original book keeps the reader guessing until the death - and beyond

An idiosyncratic delight...Yet again, Beard shows himself to be one of our most inventive novelists

A brilliant reimagining of the Lazarus story...wry, incisive and surprisingly moving (Favourite Books of 2011)

Ultimately it is the narrative voice - cultivated, wry, yet not too knowing to sustain a note of wonder - that makes this novel so compelling

He can stir emotion quickly and simply... his essayistic digressions temper the mythic luminosity of his subject

Beautiful prose...this is a challenging, thoughtful read, even for the die-hard heathen

Beard writes with sharp clarity; short unadorned sentences that contain an unforced, incisive wit....Lazarus's legend continues to fascinate in this totally original book

A fascinating mixture of fiction and academic essay...using biblical sources and other, less orthodox ones, Beard weaves a compelling tale portrait of first-century Israel, of Jerusalem with its factions and sects, and of Jesus, Lazarus's enigmatic friend, as he makes his journey towards the Cross

I finished the book at a sitting. What makes it so gripping is Beard's limitless curiosity.

The approach is unusual, the narrative bold and exhilarating...this book with its melding of fiction and non-fiction, critical analysis and detective work, consolidation and controversy, is a potent combination that breathes life not only into the 'imaginative representations' of historical events but also into the possibilities of what we think a novel might be able to achieve.

So good it's almost off the scale for me. Brave, brilliant and utterly readable.

What would you do, given the second chance of a lifetime? 
 
Like most men in their thirties, Lazarus has plans that don't involve dying. He's busy. Life is good. 
 
But he can't cheat destiny. 
 
Lazarus dies. Jesus weeps. Lazarus returns to life. This part we all know. 
 
But as Lazarus is about to find out, returning from the dead isn't easy. He thinks he wants a second chance at life, but what will he do when he gets it?

One Life, Two Friends, Three Genders

Becoming Drusilla

Funny, brilliant, original: the story of a friendship between two men and what happened when one of them announced he was becoming a woman.

A wonderfully sympathetic account of how and, possibly, why Drew became Dru

A gentle, wise and touching book, full of warmth, humour, friendship and humanity

This beautifully-written and thoroughly well-researched book is Beard's searingly honest attempt to understand what his friend had gone through ... It is deliciously un-PC, unpreachy, refreshingly free of sentimentality, and, at times, drily comic... touching and life affirming. It left me marvelling about human nature. There aren't many of those kinds of books about

This very personal story of how the friendship between two men had to be completely re-evaluated when one of them had a sex change is written in an honest and deeply thoughtful way and is totally devoid of any sensationalism or prurience

‘A brave and intelligent book’ Daily Telegraph 
 
An unforgettable memoir about gender, journeys and enduring friendship 
 
For years Richard Beard would take spontaneous holidays with his motor-cycling friend Drew. They would spend a few days walking, camping, cycling, canoeing - outdoor, manly fun - before returning to everyday life: wives, children, jobs. Richard was writing novels. Drew was working in the engine-room of cross-channel passenger ferries. Then one year Drew phoned to announce a complication: he was planning to transition and begin living as a woman. 
 
 This is the story of how Drew became Dru, of what happened to their friendship, and their adventures in wildest Wales the first time they went camping as man and woman. It is warm, sad, funny; an intimate tale of shared humanity.

A Novel of [Not] Smoking

'Beard is as good on the sensuality of smoking as on the philosophy. This is an unusually intelligent, funny and readable first book' Sunday Times 
 
She offered me the cigarette like an apple. It was love and desire. It was knowledge and everything. 
 
'Gregory Simpson is, after years of being paid to smoke a packet a day for research purposes, trying to give up. He decides to write to keep his hands busy and the resulting journal - combining memories of seduction, little-known facts about the tobacco industry and the comfortable camaraderie of the suicide club - is an elegant, witty and confident disquisition on smoking as desire and as a metaphor for desire' Observer 
 
'Populated by a cast of well-drawn eccentrics-loaded with encyclopaedic detail on the history and iconography of smoking, this comic novel nevertheless aims at deep seriousness-Beard's writing can be breathtaking' Daily Telegraph 
 
'Richard Beard's prose is dry, nonchalant and fluent-An accomplished first novel' Times Literary Supplement

Richard Beard

Books by Richard Beard

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