Phillip Donnelly: 9 books

Travelling through a country he has always dreamed of visiting, the author is confused and perplexed by India; a land he does not understand, and one that does not conform to the rules of any society or culture he has yet encountered. This book is the story of his attempt to make sense of it all....

Join the author on his month-long journey from Macao to Beijing: from the hi-tech metropolis of Hong Kong to old Llasa, from the pollution of Chengdu to the pristine beauty of Yangshuo, from the tomb of the First Emperor to the new model city of Zhuhai. Join him on a journey through time, from China’s...

On turning forty the author leaves Paris and the West for Asia. En route he spends a Summer teaching English in Beirut, a city that was once a byword for civil war, terrorism and the clash between East and West. Twenty years after the war ended, there are still scarred buildings and psyches, and religious...

More by default than by design, the author finds himself on a six-month contract in a remote part of northern Vietnam. As the year ends, he travels south, through a land that refuses to conform to the cliché the world has built around myopic Hollywood war movies. In attempting to understand the country,...

From a rat’s eye view of the London blitz to a cadaver with a complaint about the size of her coffin, this collection of short stories brings us into a comically surreal world that will leave you questioning your ability to tell up from down. What the characters in these stories have in common is...

Something is rotten in the Ministry of Mammals. S. Fox, a recent recruit, finds that his new life in the office block is every bit as dangerous as in his native forest. In a set of letters written to his cousin, Arctic Fox, we follow his trials, as he tries to navigate a way through the forests...

David Vincent is a man at war: at war with the office; at war with himself; and at war with the screen that stares into his eyes. A dark force in the Ministry of the Environment’s ‘Rainbow Building’, he secretly fights green hypocrisy, radioactive civil service jargon and the machinations of...

"The blood is the life! The blood is the life!" is all a mysterious bullied teenage dropout, Patient K, will say. Possessed by Dracula during a hallucinogenic trip, he embarks on a quest to find his immortal beloved. His psychiatrist's 'Notes on a Case of Obsessional Neurosis' piece together...

John Milton's major poems have long provoked wide-ranging judgements about the purposes of his biblical engagement. In this elegant and insightful study, Phillip J. Donnelly transforms our common perceptions about Milton's writing. He challenges the traditional assumption that the poet shared our...