About the Author

Adam Mars-Jones’ first collection of stories, Lantern Lecture, won a Somerset Maugham Award in 1982, and he appeared on Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists lists in 1983 and 1993. His debut novel, The Waters of Thirst, was published in 1993 by Faber & Faber. It was followed by Pilcrow (2008) and Cedilla (2011), which form the first two parts of a semiinfinite novel series. His essay Noriko Smiling (Notting Hill Editions, 2011) is a book-length study of a classic of Japanese cinema, Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Spring. His memoir Kid Gloves was published by Particular Books in 2015. He won the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize for Box Hill. He writes book reviews for the LRB and film reviews for the TLS.

Reviews

‘The biggest small book of the year.’
— John Self, Guardian

‘An exquisitely discomfiting tale of a submissive same-sex relationship ... perfectly realised.’
— Anthony Cummins, Observer

‘I very much enjoyed Box Hill. It is a characteristic Mars-Jones mixture of the shocking, the endearing, the funny and the sad, with an unforgettable narrator. The sociological detail is as ever acutely entertaining.’
— Margaret Drabble

‘Adam Mars-Jones has never needed to write at great length to convince readers of his talent.... Mars-Jones’s latest work is a sliver of a novel that provides ample evidence of his prowess.... Box Hill is not a novel for the prudish, but it is a masterclass in authorial control.... Despite its diminutive length, it is rich with detail and complexity, and has plenty to demonstrate Mars-Jones’s well-deserved place on any list of our best.’
— Alex Nurnberg, Sunday Times

‘A clever and subtle novel.’
— Max Liu, Financial Times

‘The very best novel of the year was Adam Mars-Jones’s complex, shifting and sensationally lewd Box Hill – for once in 2020 a novel written not to make an approved point or demonstrate its author’s virtue but to explore calmly the wildest stretches of human behaviour. Its subject is cruelty, both theatrically performed and executed in reality, without costumes. A masterpiece that Dame Ivy would have been greatly interested by.’
— Phillip Hensher, Spectator