An instant Sunday Times bestseller, O Brother is by turns heart-breaking and hilarious - evoking a working-class childhood of the 1970-80s and trying to answer the questions that often haunt the survivors of suicide

SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE
A GUARDIAN BEST MEMOIR OF 2023
A WATERSTONES BEST BOOK OF 2023

John Niven's little brother Gary was fearless, popular, stubborn, handsome, hilarious and sometimes terrifying. After years of chaotic struggle against the world took his own life at the age of 42.

Tracking the lives of two brothers in changing times - from illicit cans of lager in 70s sitting rooms to ecstasy in 90s raves - O Brother is a tender, affecting and often uproariously funny story. It is about the bonds of family and how we try to keep the best of those we lose alive. It is about black sheep and what it takes to break the ties that bind. Fundamentally it is about how families survive suicide, 'that last cry, from the saddest outpost.'

AS the twentieth century breathes its very last, with Britpop at its zenith, twenty-seven-year-old A&R man Steven Stelfox is slashing and burning his way through London's music industry. Blithely crisscrossing the globe in search of the next megahit--fueled by greed and inhuman quantities of cocaine--Stelfox freely indulges in an unending orgy of self-gratification. But the industry is changing fast and the hits are drying up, and the only way he's going to salvage his sagging career is by taking the idea of cutthroat to murderous new levels.

Music From Big Pink is a moving book that succeeds not just in vividly evoking its time and place but in distilling one young man's cliched and minor destiny into something approaching tragedy....This well-written first novel captures not just some of the dreams of that bygone era, but the way those dreams died.
-Greg Kamiya, The New York Times Book Review

Music From Big Pink is faction: real people like Richard Manuel, Rick Danko, Bob Dylan and Albert Grossman rub shoulders with fictional characters and actual, documented events thread their way through text alongside imagined scenarios. Through the eyes of 23-year-old Greg Keltner, drug-dealer and wannabe musician, we witness the gestation and birth of a record that will go on to cast its spell across five decades - bewitching and inspiring artists as disparate as The Beatles, Eric Clapton, Travis, Wilco and Mercury Rev.

Brilliant.
--GQ

Hilarious.
-- The Times (London)

A novel about golf that is not only hilarious, but gripping, sexy, violent, and outrageous. . . . Niven combines his increasingly bizarre plots, and some shocking behavior, with considerable skill and, of course, large helpings of humor.
-- The Mirror

From Kill Your Friends author John Niven, The Amateurs is a side-splitting and whip-smart examination of golf, infidelity, and how little white balls make some men insane.

Irish novelist Kennedy Marr is a first rate bad boy. When he is not earning a fortune as one of Hollywood's most sought after script writers, he is drinking, insulting and philandering his way through LA, 'successfully debunking the myth that men are unable to multitask'. He is loved by many women, but loathed by even more including ex-wives on both sides of the pond.

Kennedy's appetite for trouble is insatiable, but when he discovers that he owes 1.4 million dollars in back taxes, it seems his outrageous, hedonistic lifestyle may not be as sustainable as he thought. Forced to accept a teaching position at sleepy Deeping University, where his ex-wife and teenaged daughter now reside, Kennedy returns to England with a paper trail of tabloid headlines and scorned starlets hot on his bespoke heels. However, as he acclimatizes to the quaint campus Kennedy is forced to reconsider his laddish lifestyle. Incredible as it may seem, there might actually be a father and a teacher lurking inside this 'preening, narcissistic, priapic sociopath'.

STRAIGHT WHITE MALE is a wildly funny and whip smart tale of Kennedy's transatlantic misadventures. It's an uninhibited and heartfelt look at the mid-life crisis of a lovable rogue.

Salmon P. Chase was one of the preeminent men of 19th-century America. A majestic figure, tall and stately, Chase was a leader in the fight to end slavery, a brilliant administrator who as Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury provided crucial funding for a vastly expensive war, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court during the turmoil of Reconstruction, and the presiding officer of the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson. Yet he was also a complex figure. As John Niven reveals in this magisterial biography, Chase was a paradoxical blend of idealism and ambition. If he stood for the highest moral purposes--the freedom and equality of all mankind--these lofty ideas failed to mask a thirst for power so deeply ingrained in his character that it drove away many who shared his principles, but mistrusted his motives.
Niven provides a vivid description of Chase's early years--his childhood in New Hampshire (where his father's failed business venture and early death left the family all but destitute) and in Ohio (where he was sent to live with his uncle Philander, an Episcopal bishop), his education at Dartmouth, and his early law career in Cincinnati. Niven shows how the plight of the slaves stirred this reticent young lawyer, and how Chase gradually moved to the forefront of the antislavery movement. At the same time, we see how he used his growing prominence in the antislavery movement to forward his political ambitions. Niven illuminates Chase's long tenure as a public man. Twice elected United States Senator, twice chosen governor of Ohio (then the third most populous state in the Union), Chase organized the widespread but diffuse anti-slavery movement into a workable political organization, the Free Soil party (whose slogan Free Soil, Free Labor, Freemen Chase coined himself). We read of Chase's work in Lincoln's war cabinet and his tenure as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and we also follow his many political maneuvers, his attempts to undercut rivals, and his poorly run campaigns for presidential nominations. Niven also provides an intimate portrait of Chase's family life--his loss of three wives and four of his six children, and the unfortunate marriage of his beautiful daughter Kate to a rich but dissolute man--and a vivid picture of life at mid-century.
What emerges is a portrait of a tragic figure, whose high qualities of heart and mind and whose many achievements were ultimately tarnished by an often unseemly quest for power. It is a striking look at an eminent statesman as well as a revealing glimpse into political life in 19th-century America, all set against a background of the anti-slavery movement, the Civil War, and the turmoil of Reconstruction.

John C. Calhoun (1782-1850) was one of the prominent figure of American politics in the first half of the nineteenth century. The son of a slaveholding South Carolina family, he served in the federal government in various capacities--as senator from his home state, as secretary of war and secretary of state, and as vice-president in the administrations of John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Calhoun was a staunch supporter of the interests of his state and region. His battle from tariff reform, aimed at alleviating the economic problems of the southern states, eventually led him to formulate his famous nullification doctrine, which asserted the right of states to declare federal laws null and void within their own boundaries.

In the first full-scale biography of Calhoun in almost half a century, John Niven skillfully presents a new interpretation of this preeminent spokesman of the Old South. Deftly blending Calhoun's public career with important elements of his private life, Niven shows Calhoun to have been at once a more consistent politician and a far more complex human being than previous historians have thought. Rather than history's image of an assured, self-confident Calhoun, Niven reveals a figure who was in many ways insecure and defensive.

Niven maintains that the War of 1812, which Calhoun helped instigate and which nearly resulted in the nation's ruin, made a lasting impression on Calhoun's mind and personality. From that point until the end of his life, he sought security first from the western Indians and the British while he was secretary of war, then from northern exploitation of southern wealth through what he regarded as manipulation of public policy while he was vice-president and a senator. He worked tirelessly to further the South's slave-plantation system of economic and social values. He sought protection for a region that he freely admitted was low in population and poor in material resources, and he defended a position that he knew was morally inferior.

Niven portrays Calhoun as a driven, tragic figure whose ambitions and personal desires to achieve leadership and compensate for a lack of inner assurance were often thwarted. The life he made for himself, the peace he felt on his plantation with his dependent retainers, and the agricultural pursuits that represented to him and his neighbors stability in a rapidly changing environment were beyond price. Calhoun sought to resist any menace to this way of life with all the force of his character and intellect. Yet in the end Calhoun's headstrong allegiance to his region helped to destroy the very culture he sought to preserve and disrupted the Union he had hoped to keep whole.

Niven's masterful retelling of Calhoun's eventful life is a model biography.

This book explores the interrelated themes of modernization and slavery, issues that created reform movements in the North, defensive sectionalism in the South, social disruption, and a general failure of political leadership. During this period the Union underwent the increasing strains of uneven social and economic development. Modernization and slavery provide the backdrop for the action and reaction of northern and southern players who sought but ultimately failed to allow an accommodation that would let competing social and economic institutions coexist.

The third volume of The Salmon P. Chase Papers documents Chase's career from early 1868--the beginning of his second terms as the governor of Ohio--through the pivotal election of 1860 and the first two years of his service as secretary of the Treasury in Abraham Lincoln's wartime cabinet. Now for the first time there is ready access to a crucial record of the nation's descent into civil war. The National Historical Publications and Records Commission provides financial support for the publication of The Salmon P. Chase Papers.

Transcriptions of Chase's most important letters to the prominent political figures of his day, including Martin and John Van Buren, Gamaliel Bailey, Frederick Douglass, Joshua Giddings, John P. Hale, William H. Seward and Charles Sumner, are among those collected in this first ever published edition of his correspondence. Besides offering valuable insight into Chase's character, private life, and cultural affairs, this collection contributes to an understanding of mid-19th-century public policy, particularly antislavery reform politics.

This volume covers the last fifteen months of Chase's tenure as Treasury secretary and concludes with his nomination as Chief Justice of the United States. Of particular interest are letters that document Chase's increasing alienation from the Lincoln administration and his unsuccessful bid for the presidential nomination of the Republican-Union party in 1864. The National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the NEH, and the Claremont Graduate School provide support for the edition.

Salmon P. Chase is usually remembered for his service as Treasury secretary during the Civil War. Earlier, he had attracted national attention as an antislavery attorney and politician and was twice elected U.S. senator from Ohio and served two terms as governor. For the final volume of this series, John Niven has chosen 215 significant letters that shed light on the last phase of Chase's life, the eight and one half years that he presided over the United States Supreme Court as chief justice.

During this period, Chase and the Court grappled with an array of issues that redefined the rights of individuals and legal relationships among citizens, the federal government, and the states. Correspondence selected for this volume is particularly rich with insights into the inner workings of the Court and the judicial process. Other themes include Chase's quest for the Democratic nomination to the presidency in the elections of 1868 and 1872, his role as presiding officer during the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson, and the scandalous breakup of the marriage of his socialite daughter, Kate Chase Sprague, and her millionaire husband, U.S. Senator William Sprague of Rhode Island. The volume closes with Chase's death on May 7, 1873, at the New York City residence of his youngest daughter, Janet (Nettie) Chase Hoyt.

Representative correspondents in this volume include such national leaders as Stephen Field, Horace Greeley, Andrew Johnson, and Charles Sumner, as well as relatives and personal friends such as Jay Cooke. As in previous volumes, the editors have supplemented their meticulous transcriptions of the manuscripts with detailed notes, a chronology, an index, and a narrative introduction. The National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and Claremont Graduate University provide support for the edition.