On the Run with Mary - Softcover

Barrow, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 193993124X ISBN 13: 9781939931245

Publisher: New Vessel Press, 2016

Synopsis

"A masterpiece by a young genius, fated to die shortly after he had completed it."
―A.N. Wilson, author of Victoria: A Life and Tolstoy: A Biography

Shining moments of tender beauty punctuate this story of a youth on the run after escaping from an elite English boarding school. At London's Euston Station, the narrator meets a talking dachshund named Mary and together they're off on escapades through posh Mayfair streets and jaunts in a Rolls-Royce. But the youth soon realizes that the seemingly sweet dog is a handful; an alcoholic, nymphomaniac, drug-addicted mess who can't stay out of pubs or off the dance floor. In a world of abusive headmasters and other predators, the sexually omnivorous youth discovers that true friends are never needed more than on the mean streets of 1960s London, as he tries to save his beloved Mary from herself. On the Run with Mary mirrors the horrors and the joys of the terrible twentieth century. Jonathan Barrow's original drawings accompany the text.

Jonathan Barrow was born in 1947, north of London. His promising career as a writer and artist was cut short when he was killed at age twenty-two in a car crash alongside his fiancée, two weeks before they were to be married. The manuscript was discovered in Barrow's office drawer the day after his death.

About this title

About the Author

Jonathan Barrow was born in 1947, an hour’s drive north of London in Sawbridgeworth, England, the youngest of five brothers. He attended Harrow, the boarding school whose alumni include Winston Churchill and Lord Byron, but never completed his secondary education. Barrow worked at the Dorchester and Claridge’s hotels in London before being hired as an advertising copywriter. He published short stories—keenly observed, outrageously inventive parodies of English snobbishness and eccentricities—in The London Magazine and exhibited his drawings at London’s Redfern Gallery, which has represented leading British artists like Henry Moore and David Hockney. His brother found the closely-typed, much scribbled-upon manuscript of On the Run with Mary in Barrow’s office drawer the day after the author's death in 1970, at age twenty-two. He died in a car crash alongside his fiancée, two weeks before they were to be married. This book, in which the narrator witnesses and uncannily prophesies what was planned as a wedding turn into a funeral, can be seen as both protracted suicide note and feverish love letter.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Vessel Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 193993124X
• ISBN 13: 9781939931245
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 133