Joseph Connolly is the bestselling author of more than ten novels – including Poor Souls (1995), It Can’t Go On (2000) and England’s Lane (2012) – and numerous works of non-fiction, among them biographies of P. G. Wodehouse and Jerome K. Jerome, and a pioneering guide to the collecting of modern first editions. He is a regular reviewer of restaurants and a dedicated champion of eating out. Connolly was for many years the proprietor of the Flask Bookshop in Hampstead, London.