Make Room for the Jester

With a foreword by Phillip Pullman, Make Room for the Jester is a haunting journey from the edge of childhood into a threatening adult world. Lew Morgan and Gladstone Williams are two friends trying to make sense of their lives over a long hot summer in the north Wales seaside town of Porthmawr. It will be a summer that changes everything. When the charming but drunk Ashton Vaughan returns home to Porthmawr the primeval swamp of respectability he triggers a chain reaction of ruin, disillusion and death which keeps the whole town bubbling for most of the summer. There's fraud, farce, drama, drunkenness, temperance, hysteria and tragedy. This Welsh take on The Catcher in the Rye is a remarkable and welcome rediscovery.

Stead Jones was born in 1922 and was brought up in Pwllheli, north Wales. Make Room for the Jester is his first novel, and was published in 1964 to much critical acclaim. It was followed in 1966 by The Ballad of Oliver Powell (published under the title The Man with the Talents in the USA), and in 1968 by his third and last novel, The Lost Boy. His given name was Timothy Evan Jones, but all of his books were published under the pseudonym Stead Jones.