On a bleak mid-week evening early in the new year, a semi-professional jazz musician is nearing the end of a pub session when he suddenly recognizes, sitting at the back of a room, a woman who disappeared from his life ten years earlier. Why is she here? What does she want? Uncovering answers to these questions is at the heart of John Lucas’s new novel. Set in a small midlands town, The Plotting is about the often hidden motives by which seemingly ordinary people choose to steer their lives. Lighter in tone than Waterdrops, Lucas’s previous novel, The Plotting is as ingeniously constructed and as much concerned with the discovery of difficult truths.

About the author:

John Lucas has published ten collections of poetry, including Studying Grosz on the Bus, winner of the 1990 Aldeburgh Poetry Prize. His versions of the Poems of Egil’s Saga, an Everyman Modern Classics, has been re-issued as I, the Poet Egil. In 2008 92 Acharnon Street won the Author’s Club Dolmen Award for Travel Literature and three years later Next Year Will Be Better: A Memoir of England in the 1950s was made a Book of the Year in the Guardian and Times Literary Supplement. His novel, Waterdrops, was published in the same year and was followed by A Brief History of Whistling, co-authored with Allan Chatburn. His account of Rebels in English Cricket, The Awkward Squad, was short-listed for the 2015 Crciket Writers’ Book of the Year Award. Professor Emeritus at the Universities of Loughborough and Nottingham Trent, John Lucas has published numerous critical and literary historical studies. He runs Shoestring Press.