Mister Fabulous and Friends - Softcover

What do you do when the kids you work with have never heard of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah band, when your marijuana empire has been hijacked and your mates think Lady in Red is a really quite a good song? For Percy George Hodsoll, the answer was easy. You drive your motorbike over the central reservation and go out in a blaze of glory. George had friends - luckier, happier, richer men who got a band together to play classic R & B: Mickey, the star commercials director, has a career on borrowed time; Rhys, the conscientious doctor, is in love with Mickey's wife; four-square, big-hearted Andy, starting over after redundancy, with a dangerously sexy new neighbour; Sam, the egotist supreme, is leaving home for a woman who thinks she's an Egyptian goddess. Without George, life, love and masculinity catch up with the four old friends. It's time to move on, but where to? Start a new life? Fix the old one? Divorce? Suicide? Sex? Prison? Decisions, decisions... Funny, sad, moving, hilarious - a social comedy that touches the heart of modern middle England.

Celia Brayfield is a novelist and cultural commentator. She is the author of nine novels. Wild Weekend explores the tensions in a Suffolk village in homage to Oliver Goldmsith's She Stoops to Conquer. To explore suburban living, she created the community of Westwick and explored mid-life manners in Mr Fabulous And Friends, and the environmental implications of urbanisation in Getting Home. She has often juxtaposed historical and contemporary settings, notably eighteenth century Spain in Sunset, pre-revolutionary St Petersburg in White Ice and Malaysia in the time of World War II in Pearls. Four of her novels have been optioned by major US, UK or French producers.

Her non-fiction titles include two standard works on the art of writing: Arts Reviews (Kamera Books, 2008) and Bestseller (Fourth Estate, 1996.) Her most recent is Deep France (Pan, 2004) a journal of a year she spent writing in south-west France.

She has served on the management committee of The Society of Authors and judged national literary awards including the Betty Trask Award and the Macmillan Silver PEN Prize. A former media columnist, she contributes to The Times, BBC Radio 4 and other national and international media.