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In the spring of 1985, novelist Paul Bailey found himself becoming the unlikely owner of a dog. He saw the puppy in the window of a pet shop and was instantly (and lastingly) beguiled. She was given the name Circe by Bailey's dying partner, David, who was also overcome by her charms, though after a good deal of resistance. This memoir tells of the 16 years Paul Bailey spent in Circe's company, while also offering portraits of friends and acquaintances, living and dead. There are sketches of the various eccentrics encountered during his walks with the dog, and descriptions of the author's trips abroad - to Romania, Poland and Hungary, among other countries. A Dog's Life is the sequel to Bailey's earlier book of memoirs An Immaculate Mistake. Like that book, it is composed in a series of scenes, written as they came into the author's mind. Yet together they constitute a sustained narrative, at once funny and touching. At the heart of A Dog's Life, appropriately, is the captivating animal herself.

A love story set in Romania and England by the author of the Booker shortlisted bestseller, Gabriel's Lament. Paul Bailey's most ambitious novel yet. Kitty Crozier wakes up in a hospital ward and finds a stranger looking down at her. Thus begins the most important, most demanding, most exhilarating relationship of Kitty's life. Her lover's name is Virgil Florescu, a poet who has escaped from Ceausescu's Romania. As their liaison deepens, more is revealed of their previous lives and of their different families. Both Kitty and Virgil have unusual fathers: Kitty's is a phenomenally accomplished philanderer, while Virgil's has changed his political allegiances from left to right and back again in order to ensure his survival. The book is rich in characters and despite its tragic theme -- which is not revealed until late in the narrative -- is often fiendishly funny. For all its concern with public issues of morality, it is very much about family life -- or rather, that of two distinct families with interesting histories and secrets, not all of them unhappy.

One of the post-war English literary greats, Paul Bailey is esteemed for the piercing finesse of his writing. His new novel Uncle Rudolf exemplifies that trait: it packs a telling and surprising emotional punch, despite its apparent slightness. The narrator is a partly Jewish Romanian, Andrew Peters, looking back on his colourful life. The eponymous hero is the narrator's opera-singing uncle, who rescued the young Peters from proto-Nazi Eastern Europe, and brought him to England. As Peters regards his early years by the Danube we get to see a picture of old mittel Europe through the exile's nostalgic and rhapsodic eyes: 'Why was I thinking of pickled vegetables--of cauliflower and carrots; of green and red peppers; of radishes and red cabbage? I hadn't eaten the dish in a lifetime... and then, with an involuntary cry of anguish, and clear blue sky, I saw my mother and me tickling my father, who is pretending to be asleep on the grass.'
Poignant stuff, in itself. But Bailey/Andrews' intent isn't merely to paint a cameo portrait of Yiddish life, it's also to tell the story of how the stranger becomes the Englishman, and how intellectual and artistic values can be translated across borders.