Unfortunates

A sports journalist, sent to a Midlands town on a weekly assignment, finds himself confronted by ghosts from the past when he disembarks at the railway station. Memories of one of his best, most trusted friends, a tragically young victim of cancer, begin to flood through his mind as he attempts to go about the routine business of reporting a football match. B S Johnson’s famous ‘book in a box’, in which the chapters are presented unbound, to be read in any order the reader chooses, is one of the key works of a novelist now undergoing an enormous revival of interest. The Unfortunates is a book of passionate honesty and dark, courageous humour: a meditation on death and a celebration of friendship which also offers a remarkably frank self-portrait of its author.

One of the lost masterpieces of the sixties

In his heyday, during the 1960s and early 1970s, B. S. Johnson was one of the best-known novelists in Britain. His work includes Travelling People, Albert Angelo and House Mother Normal. A passionate advocate for the avant-garde in both literature and film, he became famous for his forthright views on the future of the novel and for his idiosyncratic ways of putting them into practice.