First published in 1962 As Near as I Can Get was Paul Ableman's follow up to his critically acclaimed debut I Hear Voices.Following Alan Peebles, a young man struggling to become a poet, As Near as I Can depicts a mid-twentieth century London of offices, pubs and lodgings. Fuelled by drink through these desperate years, the narrator charts his encounters with women and fellow artists, as he seeks to glimpse a wonder in life barely discernible beneath the ...

Paul Ableman's modern masterpiece was first published by the Olympia Press of Paris in 1958, to instant acclaim. The narrator of I Hear Voices is a young schizophrenic who transports himself, and the reader, through a wondrously transfigured city where the real and the fantastic blend together in a seamless enchantment. The continual stream and buzz of events is often comical, occasionally wrenching, and always unpredictable. Encounters with Miss Carpet, The Commissioner, Merkitt ...

'This book seems to be about us. Within a day or two of starting it I devised a title: VAC... The subtle idea was to fuse the suggestion of holiday or vacation with that of vacuum...'Paul Ableman's third novel, first published in 1968, is - through the voice of its narrator Billy Soodernim, libidinous and regretful by turns - a meditation on love and carnality, monogamy and promiscuity, childbirth, separation and indeed the whole of the fraught relations between the sexes:...

The hero of Paul Ableman's Vilp (1962) is Clive Witt, a novelist in search of a hero for his new novel. He advertises for suitable applicants, and from seventy-three replies he selects three: Professor Guthrie Pidge, a zoologist; Pad Dee Murphy, an Irish-Burmese peasant; and Harry Glebe, the inventor of the renowned earth-borer.Clive's novel, though, progresses slowly. His three heroes refuse to mix their very disparate elements into a harmonious whole. Eventually, Clive s...

Tornado Pratt is the last of the old-style American tycoons, one who has lived his life with ferocious vigour through the vacillating fortunes of the twentieth-century USA. Paul Ableman's novel finds him in a hotel room at the end of his days, as he recounts via a dying monologue the events of his turbulent life. What is revealed, in a testimony full of jokes and surprises, is a brash, lustful, comic, profane, naïve and sentimental man who, driven on by remorse, displays a wry and percepti...