From the award-winning author of Money Matters, an explosive family drama set in the Bay Area during the early months of the pandemic: a suspenseful tale of transgressions, betrayals, and the rise of outrageous conspiracy theories.

Oakland, California, 2020.

Computer scientist Adam cannot understand the widespread appeal of conspiracy theories popularized by the president. He decides to investigate one, QAnon, which turns out to have hidden connections to a White House intent on subverting the upcoming presidential election.

His wife Julia, who works at the ACLU, is terrified by the outbreak of the coronavirus and is drawn to the fake online cures Adam detests. Further threatened by the reappearance of a violent ex-boyfriend, Julia sees her life unraveling and resorts to desperate remedies.

Brian Finney’s Dangerous Conjectures is a powerful, gripping exploration of two Americans’ inner lives living through a pandemic and a culture overrun with misinformation.

At once a painful coming-of-age novel, an exciting amateur sleuth tale and an intriguing narrative involving social issues (immigration and wealth disparity), Money Matters has mystery at its core. This emotionally charged debut novel is firmly embedded in Los Angeles culture over the 2010 mid-term election. Jenny, the 27-year old inexperienced protagonist, faced with the tragic disappearance of a friend, is forced to take on financial tycoons, corrupt politicians, and the treacherous Baja drug cartel in her search to uncover the truth.

Jenny's investigation takes her into the twilight world of undocumented immigrants, which leads her to seek the help of the handsome director of an immigrant rights organization to whom she is strongly attracted. But will the deadly enmity of the rich and powerful thwart her search and end her budding romance?

What happened after 9/11 was of monumental proportions while remaining largely invisible at the time. Trauma succeeded fear and was displaced by a thirst for revenge. The Bush administration both set precedents for and reflected Americans' response to the attacks on 9/11. The book focuses on different themes in each chapter - trauma and patriotic fervor, revenge, the turn to religion and away from science, the cult of secrecy, the surveillance society, the militarization of American civil society, the acceptance of torture, and the creation of an unregulated free market. Each chapter traces the connection between government policies and practices and individual Americans' beliefs and behavior. Have the years 2001-2008 forever changed American culture and undercut Americans' belief in an ever-improving future? Or will Americans abandon fear for hope and a renewed sense of national unity?

The second revised edition (in e-book only) has had all the links in the notes updated and contains a new Postscript: Twenty Years Later, which traces the connections between 9/11 and the insurrection of January 6, 2021.

Perhaps the best-known British novelist of his generation, he had to compete with his father, Kingsley Amis (1922-95) who was himself a leading novelist of his generation. In reacting to his father he adopted a self-conscious, ludic mode of fiction and cultivated a unique and much imitated style.
The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 situates his life in the context of the literary climate and social, political and cultural gestalt of his lifetime. It constitutes the most extensive biographical narrative to appear by the date of publication. Part 2 provides a critical introduction to the eleven novels, two collections of short stories, two autobiographical works, and three collections of essays, reviews, profiles, and articles that he had published so far. Part 3 offers a more advanced examination of the major critical debates about the nature and value of his work. They range from his turn to American fiction for models, his portrayal of women (including charges of misogyny), and his unusual views on linguistic language ("Style is morality," he wrote).

Between them they changed the shape of British fiction with their innovative methods of narration and their appeal to an international readership. Many of them looked abroad for inspiration - Amis admired Bellow and Nabokov, Barnes looked to Flaubert and the French novelists, while Rushdie was raised as a trans-national citizen of the world. The vision of these writers was global compared to the provincial outlook of most British novelists since World War Two. This widening of the British novel's interest ran parallel to Britain's embrace of multinational capitalism under Margaret Thatcher. The period of late modernity compelled these writers to seek out new ways of narrating it. Confronted with a world threatened by nuclear destruction, most of these novelists rejected the notion of a unified personality and played with the poststructuralist notion of multiple selves. The book is divided into three sections: History, Modernity and Metafiction (Ackroyd, Barnes, Amis, Byatt McEwan); National Cultures and Hybrid Narrative Modes (Rushdie, Kureishi, Ishiguro); and Narrative Constructions of Identity (Carter, Winterson, Swift).

This critical study applies different literary theories to the novel, revealing the plurality of meanings inherent in it, while avoiding the use of technical language that theorists are prone to employ. Its nine chapters clearly indicate the theoretical lenses through which the novel is looked at: Genesis; Genre; the Psychoanalytic Perspective; History, Class and Society; Lawrence and Women;  Structure, Theme and Form; Narrative Voice and Focus; Character; and Symbolic Motifs. Seen from these various perspectives, Sons and Lovers reveals a proliferation of meaning that reflects the writer's deep ambivalence and offers the reader a multiplicity of interpretations.

Finney focuses on subjective autobiographies in which attention is focused on the self, which he considers a distinctively twentieth-century form of the genre. This incisive study of selected autobiographical works by British novelists, poets, and playwrights begins with "Versions of Truth," in which Finney sets out to demonstrate--using among others the works of W.H. Davies, George Orwell, Joseph Conrad, and Christopher Isherwood--the extent to which autobiographical narrative, like other forms of narrative, makes heavy use of aesthetic criteria even when the writer is most concerned with giving a completely honest version of the facts. The second section, "In Search of Self," reviews the ways modern autobiographers have chosen to portray themselves (including their unconscious) based on psychoanalytical insights peculiar to the 20th century. Employing the theories of Freud and Jung, Finney reads the autobiographies of Edmund Gosse, W.B. Yeats, H.G. Wells, Stephen Spender, and others to demonstrate the nature of the insights psychology has to offer readers and writers of 20th-century autobiography.

Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in Biography (1979)

It argues that some of his later novels are just as powerful as the Berlin novels which made him famous. Using interviews with Isherwood and others and citing from Isherwood's unpublished letters at the time, Finney shows how the events in Isherwood's life became transformed into his fiction. Interspersed chapters offer informed critical analysis of all his major work up to 1978. This biography won the James Tait Black Memorial Award for non-fiction in 1979. It was also chosen by Philip Toynbee as one of his best three books of the year in the Observer.

This short book was the first to focus on five such works he published between 1965 and 1970 - Imagination Dead Imagine; Enough; Ping; Lessness; and The Lost Ones. Finney analyzes each work from a different vantage point - the mania for disorder, the artist's excavation of the humans' suffering interior, his figurative use of light and dark, his paradoxical representation of changelessness as continuous change, the way the perceiver infects what is perceived, the impossible search for artistic failure, and his preoccupation with form. The book incorporates Beckett's answers to the author's written questions to him. Since How It Is offers a lucid commentary and analysis of these condensed and powerful compositions written by the outstanding writer of his time.