'Disgusting and brilliant – should earn Meades justifiable comparison to Joyce, Celine, Pynchon' Paul Spike, Vogue.

At first glance, this 1993 masterpiece is a post-war family saga set in and around the city of Portsmouth. This doesn't come close to communicating the scabrous magnificence of Meades's creation. Pompey is an obscene, suppurating vision of an England in terminal decline.

The story begins with Guy Vallender, a fireworks manufacturer from Portsmouth, who has four children by different four different women. There's poor Eddie, a feeble geek with a gift for healing; 'Mad Bantu', the son of a black prostitute, who was hopelessly damaged in the womb by an attempted abortion; Bonnie, who is born beautiful but becomes a junkie and a porn star; and finally Jean-Marie, a leather-wearing gay gerontophiliac conceived on a one-night stand in Belgium.

The narrator is 'Jonathan Meades', cousin to poor Eddie and Bonnie, who tells the story of how their strange and poisonous destinies intersect. And although there is no richer stew of perversity, voyeurism, corruption, religious extremism and curdled celebrity in all of English literature, there is also an underlying compassion and jet-black humour which makes Pompey an important and strangely satisfying work of art. Prepare to enter the English novel's darkest ride...



Jonathan Meades' books include three works of fiction –  Filthy English, Pompey and The Fowler Family Business  – and several collections including  Museum Without Walls , which received thirteen nominations as a book of the year in 2012. 

 An Encyclopaedia of Myself  was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize and longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2014. His first and only cookbook,  The Plagiarist in the Kitchen , was published in 2017.  Pedro and Ricky Come Again  (2021) was the sequel to  Peter Knows What Dick Likes  (1988).

Meades has written and performed in more than sixty highly acclaimed television films on predominantly topographical subjects such as French nationalism, the Baltic and dictators' architecture. He also creates artknacks and treyfs. Treyf means impure, not kosher: it defines his approach to all writing, film and art. He lives in France.



'There is no doubt that Pompey is the product of a brilliant mind: one would not, however, wish to dine with its author'



'Disgusting and brilliant – should earn Meades justifiable comparison to Joyce, Celine, Pynchon'



'If Meades was a racehorse you'd be calling for a stewards' enquiry. There's something in his feed which gives him the lot'