Latest Works

A novel

Ten Stories about the intuitive and irrational.

“Two plays that share a single searching preoccupation: what happens when the structures we build to protect ourselves begin to imprison us? This collection brings together Second Time Round, a musical about a London lawyer’s ill-fated arrangement with a Romanian handyman, warm and finally heartbreaking, and The Well-Intentioned Builder, a formally extraordinary piece in which actors become the walls of a house as it is dismantled from the foundations up. Each play is accompanied by an extended companion guide.”

Quote By: Julia Popescu, (The Cultural Observer, Bucharest)

Culture and politics

“From the Athenian agora to the court of King Donald, Sliding Scales traces the long, turbulent, and often farcical journey of democracy and asks whether the system we’ve inherited still serves the people it claims to represent. Moving through the Glorious Revolution, the age of empire, the Cold War, and the digital present, Elsom examines the myths, compromises, and contradictions at the heart of democratic governance with the clarity of a historian and the wit of a cultural critic.”

Quote By: Lord Alderdice, (House of Lords)

A novel

How to Succeed in the World of AI.

“What draws us towards the edge? That question haunts the narrator of Big DaDa from the opening pages and it never quite lets him go. Beginning with the strange, unexplained death of a meticulously organized accountant, John’s novel traces one man’s rise through the gleaming, surveillance-saturated world of the OMG Leisure Hotel chain. From bell boy to bar assistant to the corridors of power, our narrator is propelled upward by a restless spirit that no amount of corporate comfort can contain. Funny, unsettling, and deeply humane, Big DaDa charts a collision between the irreducibly human and the relentlessly algorithmic.”

Quote By: Patrick Curry, (Author & Poet)

A novel

Ten Stories about the intuitive and irrational.

“Ten stories exploring the boundary between reason and instinct, the knowable and the unknown. Set across continents and decades, from the literary café’s of 1960s Paris to quiet English suburbs haunted by grief, from wartime field dispatches to the strange inner life of a woman living at the edge of empire, World Within is precise, humane, and unexpectedly moving. Its epigraph sets the terms: ‘To worship is to seek contact with the unknown. In a world without worship, you must apply for a research grant.’”

Quote By: Julia Popescu, (The Cultural Observer, Bucharest)