Alan Bilton

Author

Alan Bilton

Alan Bilton was born in York in 1969. In keeping with the two main sources of employment back then, his family either worked on the railways or in chocolate; but he did neither.


Rather, he received his undergraduate degree in Literature and Film from Stirling University in 1991, and his PhD from Manchester University in 1995. He is married, with one small child and one hairy dog. His first novel, The Sleepwalkers’ Ball, described as ‘Kafka meets Mary Poppins’, was published by Alcemi in 2009. He is also the author of books on silent film comedy, contemporary fiction, and America in the 1920s, alongside short stories, essays and reviews. He teaches Creative Writing, fiction and film at Swansea.

Contemporary Fiction - Short Stories

Anywhere Out of the World

What if you woke up in the morning to find the world utterly transformed? What if a wrong turn took you to a strange, unknown place? What if the barrier between the real and the impossible proved to be much more fragile than anybody could possibly have imagined?

From the prodigious imagination of the cult writer Alan Bilton, author of The Known and Unknown Sea and The Sleepwalkers’ Ball comes a collection of strange and unsettling short stories, poised midway between horror and comedy, the deeply mysterious and the utterly absurd.

Drop through trapdoors and explore secret passages between the everyday and the fantastical, a labyrinth whose secrets leads one deeper and deeper into the unknown. At every step, the curious, the lost, and the unwary stumble through an opening to another world - a world unlike any other in contemporary fiction.

Anywhere Out of the World

by Alan Bilton

Publisher: Cillian Press
Pub Date: 07/2016

ISBNs:
PB: 978-1-909776-16-6
EB: 978-1-909776-17-3


Paperback RRP: £9.99

Category: Fiction: Short Stories; Short Stories & Anthologies; Fiction: Fantasy- Contemporary

BIC Codes: FYB, F

Binding: Trade Paperback
Size: Demy (216 x140mm) 5.5 x 8.5
Pages: 266
Distributor UK: Ingrams/Gardners/Cillian Press
Price RRP: GBP 9.99; EUR 11.95; USD 14.95; AUD 18.00

Information Sheet

Available at most online retailers and at selected bookstores.

Anywhere Out of the World

by Alan Bilton

Publisher: Cillian Press
Pub Date: 07/2016

ISBNs:
PB: 978-1-909776-16-6
EB: 978-1-909776-17-3


Paperback RRP: £9.99

Category: Fiction: Short Stories; Short Stories & Anthologies; Fiction: Fantasy- Contemporary

BIC Codes: FYB, F

Binding: Trade Paperback
Size: Demy (216 x140mm) 5.5 x 8.5
Pages: 266
Distributor UK: Ingrams/Gardners/Cillian Press
Price RRP: GBP 9.99; EUR 11.95; USD 14.95; AUD 18.00

Information Sheet

Available at most online retailers and at selected bookstores.

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OTHER BOOKS

By the same Author


Contemporary Fiction

The Known and Unknown Sea

This haunting and comic fable from the critically acclaimed author of The Sleepwalkers’ Ball is a beautiful and heartbreaking journey through memory, loss and imagination.

Rumour and suspicion engulf an eerily fog-bound town as its residents begin to receive tickets promising passage across the mist-shrouded bay to the mysterious ‘other side’. For Alex and his family, this seems like the beginning of a great adventure, but as reports of a shadowy, half-glimpsed ship start to circulate, so too does the gossip and anxious speculation.

Dreamlike and immersive, it’s a pantomime nightmare, surreal, terrifying and hilarious, full of masks and metamorphoses. It’s a world seen through the eyes of children, magical, kaleidoscopic and incomprehensible.


Contemporary Fiction

The End of the Yellow House

ISBN: 978-0552775632

Central Russia, 1919, a sanatorium cut off by the chaos of the Russian civil war.

The murder of the chief doctor sets in motion a nightmarish series of events involving mysterious experiments, the secret police, the Tsar’s double, an enigmatic ‘visitor’, giant corpses, possessed cats, sorcery, and the overwhelming madness of war, in this fantastical and wildly exuberant historical novel.

Contemporary Fiction

The Sleepwalkers' Ball

ISBN: 978-0955527265

Obsessions with train journeys and silent film are Alan Bilton’s childhood legacy, and both are crucial to his first novel, The Sleepwalkers’ Ball (Alcemi, 2009), which was nominated for the People’s Book Prize in November 2009. The novel features nightmarish train journeys: the anxiety of lateness; losing or merely lugging around luggage; the pressure of packed stations and waiting for loved ones; carriages which are chopped up and fed to a train’s furnace while a bride and groom look on, en route to their honeymoon: all appear or recur in this surreal debut.

Hans is a dreamer, a waiter, a security guard, a young man tending elderly parents, a layabout, an old man scribbling his memories. Driven out in his pyjamas into a strangely black and white Scottish town, Hans sets off in search of both his girl and the one mysterious thing that will solve the riddle of his life. Clara is the art school girl with the lovely round face and ants in her pants, the crazy girl from the pub, always hindered by luggage or her dodgy innards, the sleepy waitress at the ball in the castle grounds, the blowzy dame with the world’s most beautiful mouth. But can they find each other in time?

Set sometime around now, and yet also any time, this is a beautifully surreal romantic comedy wrapped around the forms of the silent film and the Gothic city ghost tour. A cross between Kafka and Mary Poppins, The Sleepwalkers’ Ball is filmic, funny and lyrical in turns. Always moving, it follows two lives: a man and a woman, and their many attempts to hook up together.