Impromptu in Moribundia

I recommend Hamilton at every opportunity, because he was such a wonderful writer and yet is rather under-read today. All his novels are terrific Sarah Waters

If you were looking to fly from Dickens to Martin Amis with just one overnight stop, then Hamilton is your man Nick Hornby

Patrick Hamiltons novels were the inspiration for Matthew Bournes new dance theatre production, The Midnight Bell.

Impromptu in Moribundia is a satirical fable about one (nameless) mans trespass (through a fantastical machine called the Asteradio) into a parallel universe on a far-off planet where the miserably dull affairs of England are mirrored and transformed into an apparent idyll of bourgeois English imagination.

Moribundia is the physical enactment of the stereotypes and myths of English middle-class culture and consciousness. Yet the narrator comes to discover that he has stumbled among a people characterised by cupidity, ignorance, complacence, meanness, ugliness, short-sightedness, cowardice, credulity, hysteria and, when the occasion called for it . . . cruelty and blood-thirstiness.