Conville & Walsh Ltd

LIKE BROTHERS
Men & Friendship
Michael Bywater
Praise for Michael Bywater
Conville & Walsh Ltd
Non-fiction
Bywater’s book LOST WORLDS is the best thing about — better than iPods, the first rime of winter, salty
porridge, Paula Rego, chocolate bars dusted with cinnamon and the Dandy annual... [he] writes so well it makes
you want to cut your throat with a butter-knife, and yet so enticingly that you keep putting off the fatal act until
you’ve finished the page, and the next one too...
– Andrew Marr, DAILY TELEGRAPH
A magnificent companion... playful, gruff, intemperate, eloquent... exuberantly spilling over into footnotes,
parentheses and jokes... It’s where stand-up comedy meets sit-down thought... Bywater proves himself to be a
member of an exclusive, intellectually reckless and restless club that would also include Jorge Luis Borges,
Laurence Sterne and E.L.Wisty
– David Flusfeder, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
Four years after his best friend of twenty years, Douglas Adams, had died, Michael Bywater tried for
the last time to call him. The questions that this event raised form the central theme to LIKE
BROTHERS, which will interweave with the crucial friendships of Michael's life – such as his friendship
with Douglas – the story of men and their friendships in general: how we feel about them, how they
work, how ideas of friendship have changed over time and between cultures and how it is that, now,
friendships between men go almost unspoken-of, even though they are often among the most
nourishing and long-lasting relationships of their lives, weathering storms which can destroy marriages
and wreck lives.
Like love affairs, male friendships seem to those involved to be unique, yet, to the onlooker, most if
not all are fundamentally the same. From the voluble, tactile, demonstrative friendships between
Greek men, to the terribly English friendship which has been described as “beginning with a careful
avoidance of personal confidences, and ending in complete silence”; from the religious ceremonies of
mediaeval sworn-brotherhood and the Greek Orthodox adelphopoiesis which persists even today, to
the waspish but inseparable academic brothers-in-arms at an Oxbridge High Table; from the pairs of
spiffily-dressed youths leaning on their motorcycles in the back streets of Rome to the elderly Arabs
strolling hand-in-hand through the suq of Manama, and taking in the two nonagenarian Jewish
gentlemen playing chess in a shirt-pocket-sized square of dusty Manhattan “park”, and the pair of
poplin-suited lawyers drinking tall skinny corporaccinos (hold the Sweet-’n’-Lo) in Beverly Hills... all of
these friendships have far more in common than they have differences.
Michael Bywater is the acclaimed author of LOST WORLDS (2004), and BIG BABIES (2006), both
published by Granta. Aside from his career as a writer and broadcaster – including spending ten years
on the staff of Punch, and being the long-running columnist for the Independent on Sunday and
cultural critic for the New Statesman – he also teaches the tragedy paper at Cambridge, and in 2006
has been writer-in-residence at Magdalen College. Michael lives in Gloucestershire and has one
daughter. He is a certified pilot and plays the harpsichord.
UK Publisher Granta
Delivery March 2008
UK Publication
Status Proposal
Length 100,000-110,000 words
Agent PW
World rights (Granta)
For all rights enquiries please contact David Graham: dgraham@granta.com
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