ALL MY PRECIOUS MADNESS  is the story of a man at odds with the world. A man who wants to escape his violent past but instead – most emphatically – repeats it.

Henry Nash has hauled his way from a working class childhood in Bradford, through an undergraduate degree at Oxford, and into adulthood and an academic elite. But still, he can’t escape his anger. As the world – and men in particular – continues to disappoint him, so does his rage grow in momentum until it becomes almost rapturous.

And lethal.

A savagely funny novel that disdains literary and moral conventions, All My Precious Madness is also a work of deep empathy – even if when that also means understanding the darkest parts of humanity. It is, as critic Stephen Mitchelmore says, the book for everyone who longs for “an English Bernhard” – and to read one of the most electric debuts of the last decade.

“This is the best debut I have read in at least a decade. Anyone who has wished for an English Bernhard need look no further.” —Stephen Mitchelmore

 

“A beautiful war machine. Bowles’s novel discovers a language, a mode of narration, to shelter the legitimate madness, the loneliness and rapture of a very singular individual.” —Lars Iyer

 

‘Unapologetically erudite and frequently brutal... a devastating satire on the way in which class, education and masculinity act as a kind of trap.’ —The Telegraph

Galley Beggar Press, 2024, 276pages.