Simon Raven

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Simon Arthur Noël Raven, (December 28, 1927 – May 12, 2001), was a novelist, journalist and dramatist. He was born in Virginia Water, Surrey, England and died in London.

1 Novels
2 Drama
3 Reference
4 External link

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Novels

His major work was a series of ten novels under the umbrella title Alms for Oblivion. The novels cover the period 1945 to 1973 and centre on a group of upper and upper middle class characters. They can be considered a novel sequence, if a somewhat loosely structured one.

The early novels are robust satires of the English upper set of the mid 1950s, but the later tend to a more detached and philosophical tone. The later novels become more concerned with the occult and supernatural, and include strange happenings, though this was a feature of Raven's work early in his career (eg with the early novel 'Doctors wear scarlet' which features Balkan vampires).

The titles in Alms for Oblivion are:

The Rich Pay Late (1964)
Friends in Low Places (1965)
The Sabre Squadron (1966)
Fielding Gray (1967, but the first by internal chronology)
The Judas Boy (1968)
Places Where They Sing (1970)
Sound the Retreat (1971)
Come Like Shadows (1972)
Bring Forth the Body (1974)
The Survivors (1976)

He followed that with the seven-volume series The First-Born of Egypt. The first book was Morning Star (1984) and the last was The Troubadour (1992).

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