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.
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.
OTHER BOOKS
By the same Author
Contemporary Fiction - Short Stories
Anywhere Out of the World
ISBN: 978-0552775632
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.
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.
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.