Boaz-Jachin the map-maker lives in a time when lions are extinct. He makes a map for his son to find everything he could ever want, but suddenly deserts his family to look for a lion. His son Boaz-Jachin, pursuing him, finds a great deal more than just his father ...

Kleinzeit
Order from Amazon UK

The novel behind the film starring  Glenda Jackson and Ben Kingsley, this tells of two lonely middle-aged dreamers who hatch a plan to liberate sea-turtles from London Zoo. The consequence is exactly what you don't expect ... 

Hoban's best-known novel. Set in a post-apocalyptic world, narrated by the eponymous twelve-year-old in a dislocated pidgin English, a unique, inspired voice. Widely recognised as a modern masterpiece, it became an instant classic on first publication in 1980; more than any of Hoban's other extraordinary work, this novel that changes the insides of its readers' heads
This is what literature is meant to be’ —Anthony Burgess

The eleventh century, during the First Crusade; the road to Jerusalem, a pilgrimage undertaken by a German Jew. Pilgermann climbs a ladder to reach another man’s wife and descends into a mob of peasants inspired by the Pope to shed the blood of Jews. Castrated and alone, he travels a brutish land inspired by Hieronymus Bosch's grotesque depictions of hell. Making his way through time, his companions include Death himself ... yet it's a richly comical work ...

A frustrated author hides away in his outpost in Fulham, working nights and trying to forget his lost love, looking for inspiration. Instead his computer puts him in touch with the Kraken, a fantastic squidlike mind in mid-existentialist crisis. A few wires-in-the-brain later, he becomes dogged by the severed head of Orpheus, which repeatedly insists on telling the story of Hermes and Calliope, and the invention of music ... perverse and true, grounded and ethereal, ridiculous and sublime ...

Hoban's closest approach to science fiction: a figure tumbles through deep space, over and over, no helmet, no space suit, yet somehow still alive. As he tries to piece together his baffling past, Fremder is interrogated by the authorities — and in particular by Dr Lovecraft, the seductive prelude to a matriarchal supercomputer that can read the colour of human fear, and relieves him of surprising quantities of semen ... more unforgettable musings on the nature of music ...

Rinyo-Clacton offers Jonathan a million pounds to accept that he will live only one more year; broken by lost love and alcohol, Jonathan acquiesces, and is plunged into a world of painful depravity and appalling coincidences on his comic journey to enlightenment and a kind of eventual triumph. Perhaps the most sensational novel of the batch, the sequel notwithstanding ...

Angelica's Grotto is a pornographic website into which 72-year-old art historian Harold Klein wanders one evening in the search for a flicker of solitary satisfaction. He visits the Grotto after losing his "inner voice", that censoring mechanism that keeps us from blurting out the first thing that pops into our heads. Definitely a book for grown-ups only, and not for the anally squeamish either, nor those who are frightened of buses.

Peter sees Amaryllis waiting for a bus which, when it arrives, towers above them, a gigantic glowing pink, yellow and orange rice-paper vehicle, lit from within like a Japanese lantern. They meet and make love in dreams, and the twisting story investigates the interplay between the worlds of sleep and waking. Lots about tee-shirts and desire ... a mood like Strangers in Space ...

Roswell and Sarah are strangers, meeting when they both decide to get tattooed with the same Chinese bat motif. Roswell gets involved in crafting provocative crash-test dummies for a Parisian sybarite who likes his gorilla and mastiff toys to have moving adult parts. It's another love-story, including a hilarious satire on contemporary art, and a whole new take on Christ, antiques, pornography and bats.

Max realises that the aristocratic Brit Lola is his destiny woman ... yet he promptly succumbs to an American temptress with an unforgettable rear-view. So Lola, of course, undertakes an astonishing journey of dedication to Indian music, and Max finds a kind of enlightenment is mixed up with the ancient earthworks at Maiden Castle. Romantic and kinky ... here and there hilarious ... everywhere laced with Hoban's characteristic, gnomic wit

We look forward to finding out what variations Mr Hoban will have wrung on his rich catalogue of obsessions ...