Christie Malry is a simple man. As a young accounts clerk at a confectionery factory in London he learns the principles of Double-Entry Bookkeeping. Frustrated by the petty injustices that beset his life – particularly those caused by the behaviour of authority figures – he determines a unique way to settle his grievances: a system of moral double-entry bookkeeping. So, for every offence society commits against him, Christie exacts recompense. 'Every Debit must have its Credit, the First Golden Rule' of the system. All accounts are to be settled, and they are – in the most alarming way.Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry, the last novel to be published in B S Johnson's lifetime, is undoubtedly his funniest.

With an introduction by Jon McGregor In his heyday, during the 1960s and early 1970s, B. S. Johnson was one of the best-known novelists in Britain. A passionate advocate for the avant-garde, he became famous for his forthright views on the future of the novel and for his unique ways of putting them into practice. Convinced that 'telling stories is telling lies' and that he should write about 'nothing else but what happens to me', Johnson produced Trawl. The novel describes, in the first-person, a three-week voyage aboard a deep-sea fishing trawler in the Barents Sea, not unlike the one Johnson undertook in preparation to write the book. Isolating himself from the world he knows, as well as from the ship's crew, the narrator reflects on past events and relationships, hoping for some kind of redemption. This convincingly authentic and harrowing attempt to get to the heart of the human condition is one of Johnson's finest novels.

A wild, experimental, polyphonic novel, recounting a typical day of diminishing returns at a nursing homeHouse Mother Normal, subtitled "A Geriatric Comedy," is the English writer B. S. Johnson's fifth novel. Unusual in both its subject and structure, this novel is a remarkable study of old age, stripped of sentimentality and spiked with bizarre language and perceptions. Made up of eight monologues describing a single day at a nursing home, House Mother Normal explores the failing minds of the elderly with precision, humor, and unflagging compassion, and Johnson achieves, with inventiveness and escalating absurdity, a vivid multidimensional effect.

B. S. Johnson is a truly unique British writer, a cult figure whose original and experimental fiction has, since his tragically early death in 1973, been rediscovered by many subsequent generations of writers and readers. In many ways the heir to Joyce and Beckett, Johnson played with form and narrative across many genres: novels, plays, poetry and memoir. To commemorate the eightieth anniversary of his birth, two of the foremost scholars of B. S. Johnson, Professor Philip Tew and Dr Julia Jordan, have joined forces with Jonathan Coe, author of the prize-winning biography, Like a Fiery Elephant, to offer a selection of his greatest uncollected or unavailable writing. Well Done God! includes his major prose work, Aren't You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?, six plays and a selection of his remarkable journalism.