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The Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess is the first scholarly edition of Burgess’s novels and non-fiction works. One of its purposes is to restore ‘lost’ novels to the canon of available work. The edition will include stage plays, musical libretti, letters and essays.

The Irwell Edition takes its title from a collected edition outlined by Anthony Burgess himself in the 1980s but never achieved during his lifetime. Each volume is edited by an expert scholar, presenting an authoritative annotated text alongside an introduction detailing the genesis and composition of the work, and the history of its reception.

The first two books in the series are The Pianoplayers and A Vision of Battlements.

Click here to learn more about the individual books, read a sample chapter and pre-order your copy! To read more about Anthony Burgess and to get involved with events taking place in his centenary year, please visit The International Anthony Burgess Foundation website.

For further information on the Irwell Edition, forthcoming books and publicity and sales queries, please click here.

The volume editors, Andrew Biswell and Will Carr and MUP senior commissioning editor, Matthew Frost, discuss the forthcoming books in the Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess – The Pianoplayers and A Vision of Battlements.

First published in 1986, The Pianoplayers is the story of Ellen Henshaw, who is put into the doubtful care of her father Billy after her mother dies, and with whom she shares a picaresque series of adventures in the boarding houses, silent cinemas and music halls of Manchester and Blackpool in the 1920s. The story revolves around Ellen’s ‘pianoplayer’ father, seldom sober but kind hearted, and an itinerant and impoverished musician who embarks on a desperate attempt to set a record for the longest piano marathon in history.

The novel is a moving, funny, and affectionate portrait of a lost world, which is the world of Anthony Burgess’s own early life. Songs from the period fill the pages, recreating the texture of the time. To mark the reappearance of this important and unjustly neglected novel, we have compiled a playlist that gives a flavour of the music that saturates its pages. Listen out for classics from the music hall, songs from the hit films – and ‘Nearer My God To Thee’, played as the Titanic sank and whose meaning becomes clear at the novel’s denouement.

A Vision of Battlements is a twentieth-century retelling of Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid, set in Gibraltar during the Second World War. Richard Ennis, a young musician who has been conscripted into the British Army, is posted to the garrison on the Rock, where his task is to prepare soldiers for life after the war.

The novel is saturated with music, both composed by Ennis and imagined by him, and these musical references occupy a central place within Burgess’s text. To celebrate the appearance of this novel in its first new edition for more than 50 years, we have compiled a playlist (available via Spotify), which reveals the full range of music that is mentioned in the text. It is clear from this playlist that Burgess’s musical tastes were unusually wide: the novel mentions little-known items from the classical repertoire, sea shanties, large-scale choral and orchestral works, pieces for Spanish guitar, operas, songs and ballets. In many respects the music in A Vision of Battlements anticipates the compositions that Burgess himself would go on to write in his second artistic career as a musician.

We hope you will enjoy listening to the music that Anthony Burgess heard in his inner ear while writing his first full-length novel.