Forthcoming: Jabez Oliphant, by John Holme Burrow (paperback)

On the 150th anniversary of the death of Settle-born geologist-novelist John Holme Burrow (1832-76), we’re proud to present the first edition since 1870 of one of the craziest novels you’ll ever read. Burrow’s Jabez Oliphant; Or, The New Prince is on the one hand a roman à clef of the rise and fall of a Trumpian cobbler’s boy from Stainforth in Ribblesdale; on the other, a dramatisation of the 18th century Prussian monarch Frederick the Great’s refutation of Machiavelli, Anti-Machiavel. A concoction worthy of the French author of penny dreadfuls, Eugene Sue, with Neapolitan brigands, a London artist reminiscent of Turner, and dialect-speaking Craven bumpkins and bourgeois, all introduced and annotated by Leeds’s Singing Organ-Grinder. Coming soon.