After Darke

Rick Gekoski is a novelist and writer of non-fiction, a rare bookseller and former academic, publisher, bibliographer, literary journalist and broadcaster. A Booker Prize Judge in 2005, Chair of Judges for the 2011 Man Booker International Prize, a life-time Vice President of English PEN and former board member of the Arvon Foundation, he has some fifty years of experience of the English literary scene.As such he is well-placed, through this new work of fiction, to cast an eye over the changes that have taken place in contemporary literary discourse. His hero, or perhaps anti-hero, but certainly not alter ego, one Dr James Darke, is an elderly Oxbridge curmudgeon, deeply at odds with the new cultural insistence on diversity and inclusivity.His author wishes it to be clear that James Darke's opinions are entirely his own.

A riot of eloquent bigotry and bluster . . . What Gekoski excels at is the hard, witty, shouty - yes, masculine - business of creating a literary hero like James Darke.