Nick Hern Books: 842 books

Winnie’s no ordinary nun. She swears, she smokes, she drinks Guinness, and she loves a sing-song with Stephen. But soon everything’s going to change. Stephen’s lost his way. Finding solace in music, he knows he must start again… if only he knew how. Kayleigh is a teenager, unsure...

During an attack on London, Imogen joins a social media campaign offering refuge to victims. Before her family have even had a chance at a reasonable discussion, John is at their door. He is different to them. He isn’t what they expected. And although they’d never admit it to themselves,...

Travelling from America to Britain to a remote Greek island, The Faith Machine explores the relationship between faith and capitalism and asks fundamental questions about the true meaning of love. On a beautiful September morning in New York, Sophie forces Tom into a decision. The choice he...

The gripping story of the sensational, real-life case in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle found himself playing detective - based on Julian Barnes’s Booker Prize-nominated novel. In 1903, Birmingham solicitor George Edalji was found guilty of a terrible crime and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment....

Based on the real-life court case of a young naval cadet unjustly accused of stealing a five-shilling postal order and first staged in 1946, The Winslow Boy has been revived many times since, including at The Old Vic in 2013. Ronnie Winslow is expelled from naval college, having been accused...

Rattigan's attack on the moral vacuity of the 'bright young things' of the twenties and thirties, written between French Without Tears and The Deep Blue Sea. David is a high-living, hard-drinking, successful writer involved with two women: his wife Joan and an earnest-minded younger woman,...

Terence Rattigan's sparkling comedy about a group of bright young things attempting to learn French on the Riviera amid myriad distractions, French Without Tears ran for over a thousand performances in the 1930s and remains a delight today. When a group of young men arrives at Professor Maingot’s...

Based on the true story of Alma Rattenbury, who, in 1935, went on trial with her eighteen-year-old lover for the murder of her husband. In the play, Terence Rattigan pits Alma against a formidable lady juror, whose own life offers a plangent counterpoint to the central tale of love, betrayal, guilt...

A double bill by Terence Rattigan, featuring two plays of striking contrast that display his astonishing range as a writer. A rarely seen comic gem, Harlequinade follows a classical theatre company whose intrigues and dalliances are revealed with increasingly calamitous consequences in an affectionate...

Love in Idleness is the third in Terence Rattigan's unofficial trilogy of war plays (after Flare Path and While the Sun Shines). It is published here alongside an earlier version of the play, Less Than Kind, which was never staged during Rattigan's lifetime. Michael, eighteen, returns to wartime...

Set in a run-down residential hotel in Bournemouth, Separate Tables consists of two linked one-act plays. In the first a lonely divorcee tracks down her former husband in order to resume a kind of half-life with him. In the other a repressed young spinster offers brave moral support to a fake major...

Terence Rattigan's epic and probing drama about the man immortalised as Lawrence of Arabia. Arrogant, flippant, withdrawn and with a talent for self-concealment, the mysterious Aircraftman Ross seems an odd recruit for the Royal Air Force. In fact the truth is even stranger than the man himself. Behind...

Terence Rattigan’s first play, published for the first time in this edition to mark the centenary of Rattigan’s birth. Written with his fellow student, Philip Heimann, while they were both at Oxford, First Episode shows an infatuated undergraduate, Tony, falling for Margot, an actress ten...

In Who is Sylvia?, which premiered in the West End in 1950, where it ran for over a year, Rattigan seems to be offering a bittersweet portayal of his father - and maybe of his own frustrated love life. Also included in this volume is Duologue, a play for one actress originally written for television...