Everything of Nigel Gray’s I have read is humane, wise and linguistically
melodic.
Kurt Vonnegut
STRANGERS and SKELETON IN THE CUPBOARD
Highly praised by the likes of Vonnegut, Bradbury and Berger, Gray's fiction is tough and uncompromising. Strangers is an epistolary novel of intimacy and disconnection. No one writes letters as lyrically honest or self-lacerating as these, of course, but the effect is moving and provocative. Gray's short stories are equally rivetting.
Murray Waldren - The Weekend Australian
I fell in love with Nigel Gray's epistolary novel, Strangers. It is a deceptively
simple form, and Gray elegantly handles the difficulties that arise. The result
is a wonderful novel. Of Happy Families, another of Gray's works, John Berger
has written: Nigel Gray is an authentic and rare writer. That is to say,
what he has lived and what he has seen pursues him until he has told it; and
what he has to tell, although familiar to millions, is ignored in most books.
Hence his heroism. High praise indeed, praise I can only echo for both
Strangers, and Skeleton in the Cupboard. There is a compassionate knowledge
about life and living in these works, a wisdom of searing honesty which is
eloquently literary but, at the same time, down-to-earth and approachable.
Donna Lee Brien – Imago
Mercifully Nigel Gray is not a fashionable writer. He is more
important, a writer of integrity who knows how to tell a story. He is not
interested in facades but in what goes on behind them, not in the rich and
famous but in ordinary people, the ways in which they live, enjoy themselves,
survive and refuse to let the power of others or their own powerlessness stupefy
them or take away their dignity. Nor does he pay tribute to theories about
writing. He remains his own man, averting his gaze from the beaten track,
hating injustice and brutality and celebrating a humanity often achieved against
the odds.
Gray feels and means everything he writes and is not afraid to face facts,
as the sharp accuracy, understatement and wit of his writing makes clear.
But because he is able to suggest the ways in which individual lives fit into
the tragi-comedy of our times his stories fill a wide, sometimes epic canvas
even as they celebrate the individual's power to be him/herself. In an age
in which so many of us live by slogans, shouting identical syllables in unison,
he celebrates the eccentric and unusual.
Sister Veronica Brady
Skeleton in the Cupboard is a set of short stories,
sometimes sombre, sometimes poignant, and always serious in underlying themes.
Gray has the capacity to construct a short narrative in the classic de Maupassant
way, so that the reader is drawn irresistibly into the narrative and intrigued
by the characters, until usually the jaws of the story snap shut in the last
lines, suddenly shifting the perspective in a way that enforces reinterpretation
of the piece. He is naturally curious about people, which is surely the fiction-writer's
sine qua non, and he is not afraid to take on the 'big themes' of death, mental
illness and loneliness. Always, the perspective is kindly and communitarian,
which gives a positive and restorative tone to the stories.
Strangers is a comic novel written in epistolary
form. A curmudgeonly and complacent Englishman corresponds with a feisty Australian
woman, and the humour is generated from incongruities, missed communication,
and underlying but paradoxical affinity. There is an element of David Lodge
in the writing, and the book is very funny.
Nigel Gray's fiction has, I think been undervalued by publishers. His very
productiveness and fluency is misleading. In fact he is a thoroughly professional
and painstaking writer whose works across the board show an amazing range,
stylistically and in terms of subtle human understanding. I think posterity
will be kinder to Nigel Gray than the current publishing circuit, which too
often clutches at short-term profit and modish fashion. Nigel Gray is a serious
and enduring writer, who deserves celebrity status for his substantial and
fine output.
Professor R S White
The excellence is there for all to admire. Some of the work is poised and
breathtakingly moving and the depth of his experience reverberates through
his writing. Nigel Gray comes across in his raw honest writing as hugely likeable
with a massive capacity for love.
The West Australian
Strangers has everything. It's gutsy, varied, direct
and marvellously well written – full of insights and quite beautiful
at times. It deserves a good readership.
Peter Cushing
Skeleton in the Cupboard is a collection of short stories with some very
strong pieces that explore a range of human emotions. Nigel Gray examines
life in terms of small incidents but manages to interweave into the lives
of his characters a larger sense of social history. Written with a strong
sense of an ending, these stories carry the reader with their narrative rhythm
and psychological insights into human behaviour. The narrative point of view
is engaging, tolerant and compassionate but never sentimental.
Prof. Vijay Mishra, Judges’ report, WA Premier’s Book Awards
LIFE SENTENCE
The stories are strong and beautifully made. I live in a ditch excavated
through mountains of no doubt very good stuff people want me to read. One
glance at Nigel Gray's work, though, was enough to hook me. I had no choice
but to read for pleasure. I hadn't done that for years. What happens to him
next seems a very fair test of the literary world's responsiveness to excellence
as contrasted with celebrity.
Kurt Vonnegut.
Gray's world is that of the young unemployed in a declining capitalist society
who, finding themselves rejected, unwanted, have somehow to express their
sense of both psychic and actual loss. His outrage at this, his refusal either
to condemn or condone the often violent action that results is wholly admirable
and sensitively articulated. While the more anecdotal stories may be artistically
the most successful, the longer and more ambitious ones are what remain longest
in one's memory. The terrible truth that nice, amiable people prevent the
niceness and amiability of others through their way of life is brought home
to us with an exemplary honesty that makes me anxious to read more fiction
by Nigel Gray.
The Listener.
These are stories about the complexities of human relationships; about youth
and childhood, and the hurt and damage inflicted on the young and the vulnerable.
Their strongest characteristic, taken collectively, is their concern and compassion,
and some of them are almost unbearably painful. Written in an inimitable style;
laconic; unsentimental; at times caustically humorous; these stories have
a disconcerting individualness about them. They make compulsive reading.
Donal MacAmhlaigh.
I read it more or less at a sitting, and found the stories enviably brilliant:
very vivid, with biting dialogue and descriptions, and very firm line.
Peter Vansittart.
Most of the stories make disturbing reading. But that is only part of the
picture because they are enlivened by the author's deadpan humour and a shrewd
perception of people that makes the bleakness of his vision more tolerable.
"Hello Baker" is a gem of a story, while "Saturday Night Out"
says as much as Sillitoe ever did about urban working-class life in its deprivation
and ugliness.
The Irish Post.
The colloquial conversations and intimate details make these stories compelling
reading, and the earthy humour is typical of the street lads who people them.
We need writers like Nigel Gray.
The Weekend Australian.
The book is the work of a polished commercial writer. He is certainly a conscientious
technician. Not a word is wasted in his stories and their controlled and balanced
structures are a model for any aspirant to the short story craft. One could
not fault Gray's writing on the technical level. One can only admire its accomplishment.
Australian Book Review.
HAPPY FAMILIES
An important novel. Gray's vision is as bleak as Hardy's, the life of his
hero as blighted as Jude's. This brutal novel is also a work of tenderness.
Stylistically more ambitious than Life Sentence, Happy Families retains that
same integrity. And integrity is the right word. It flies like a battered
standard over the ruination depicted, recording a loss, and offering a warning
to the future.
New Statesman.
There is a graphic urgency about the descriptions: the accounts of people
at the end of their tether are quite devastating. Mr Gray is a writer of exceptional
power, and his evocation of the blood-guts-and-spunk side of emotional trauma
is practically Lawrentian -- in fact several steps further than Lawrence got
-- particularly as it is contrasted by odd idyllic interludes. An angry, impressive
novel.
Encounter.
What stuns one about this book is its passionate truthfulness. He uses small
cameos of biting clarity, interweaving the past and present into an even genetic
cycle, and although a dark book that has clearly pursued its writer like it
pursues its reader, the search for light is there. Mr Gray has a rare talent.
The Sunday Tribune
It is strangely compelling -- a fly on the wall view of human misery seen
with tenderness and compassion.
British Book News.
The novel is written in a keen-edged, cutting style which lays bare the protagonist's
suffering in a clinical and utterly convincing way. Its literary style is
a major triumph. Nigel Gray has found a mature and masterly voice.
Evening Telegraph
Nigel Gray is an authentic and rare writer. That is to say, what he has lived
and what he has seen pursues him until he has told it; and what he has to
tell, although familiar to millions, is ignored in most books. Hence his heroism.
This novel ought to be read widely, and for a long time.
John Berger.
Nigel Gray writes with the compassion of a saint and the practicality of
a plumber. He is not one of the pseudo-sages who mystify suffering and then
shake their heads over it in bewildered despair. He made this story so true
to life so that we could see how life could be different.
Edward Bond.
Nigel Gray is a writer of great force and real moral power.
Malcolm Bradbury.
Happy Families is not a conventional novel. The writer's attitudes, beliefs,
criteria are not the usual ones, even among writers who attempt to cover the
same ground. The writing is powerful but pure, its strength seeming to come
from experience and observation and not mediated through the study and assimilation
of other fiction. Nigel Gray can write.
The Irish Press.
THE WORST OF TIMES
I congratulate Barnes and Noble with all my heart for publishing The Worst of Times by Nigel Gray. I would do so no matter what of his they published, since I have long been an admirer of his writing and his superhuman calm when describing the hardships inflicted on the British working class by greed and carelessness. He is a superb historian of what has really mattered to at least half of his society during most of this century, in his fiction as well as his reportage, and so is an invaluable colleague for anyone who wants to know what life is really like before formulating plans to make it better.
Kurt Vonnegut
A revelation. A must for even the most bare book collection.
Horncastle Standard
THE SILENT MAJORITY
A good book to have: in its experience, its comments and its analysis.
Raymond Williams, Times Higher Literary Supplement
Witty, provocative and a delight to read. Nigel Gray has a very perceptive pen.
Time Out
Disarmingly honest, and fresh in style.
David Lodge, Birmingham Post
A fine work, touched with humour, compassion and a righteous anger.
Tribune
Compulsive reading. A book that really is difficult to put down. Subtle, perceptive and convincing.
Morning Star
COME CLOSE
The poems are tense with passion and reason. Nigel Gray writes sane poems for a mad world.
Edward Bond
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