Michael Cox

Michael Cox has written at least 31 books. Their most popular book is The meaning of night with 27 saves with an average rating of 4.75⭐.

Author Bio

Michael Cox was born in Wellingborough in 1948, and grew up in Northamptonshire where his parents worked in the shoe industry. Bed-bound at three with a prolonged ear infection, he learnt to read. A key moment in Cox's life occured when, staying with his grandparents, he saw from a window that the neighbours were burying fine Victorian books – well bound, lavishly tooled – as they thought such things harboured disease. He and his grandparents saved them, and he was ever after absorbed in them, especially the Arabian Nights tales.

Fiction became a passion, and from Wellingborough Grammar School he went to St Catharines College, Cambridge where an academic career looked likely until he was asked to perform a score alongside a friend's silent film. In classic fashion, a talent scout saw him and Cox was offered a contract. He released two albums on EMI under the name Matthew Ellis.

In 1977 he had begun working for the Northamptonshire publisher Thorsons, noted for its health list. In 1979, Cox published *The Subversive Vegetarian* (published again in 1985 as *The New Vegetarian*).

Cox was now a freelance copy editor, working with panache and drawing out writers' intentions without imposing himself. His employers included OUP, for whom he had also written an elegant, popular biography of M.R. James (1983). Cox's taste for Victorian fiction led to his joining OUP's reference division in 1989. As well as his own anthologies of ghost stories, Victorian ghost stories and similar works, he produced *The Oxford Chronology of English Literature* (2002), but he developed a rare form of cancer that led to his early retirement in 1997. Hard-up after leaving OUP, he copy-edited, mainly for HarperCollins.

After tumours that threatened his vision were eased for a time by a major operation in 2004, he began work in earnest on a long-planned novel. Fearful of vanishing eyesight, he turned his jottings into a hefty book, *The Meaning of Night* (2006), for which, after a bidding war, he received an advance of £500,000, an unprecedented amount for a first novel. Cox's next novel, *The Glass of Time* (2008), is if anything even more gripping.

In the autumn of 2005 he found that his cancer had returned and that his sight was fading. At the time of his death he was working on a third novel.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/michael-cox-author-who-secured-a-record-advance-for-his-first-novel-1697259.html

Details	Rating	Readers Count
The meaning of night Michael Cox	4.75	6 reads
The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories Michael Cox R. A. Gilbert	0	1 read
The Glass of Time (The Meaning of Night, #2) Michael Cox	3.36	8 reads
The Meaning of Night Michael Cox	3	4 reads
Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories M.R. James	4.33	4 reads
The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories R.A. Gilbert	4	1 read
Sherlock's Home: The Empty House	5	1 read
Victorian Ghost Stories Victorian Ghost Stories: An Oxford Anthology	5	1 read
The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Ghost Stories	0	0 reads
The Twenty Years' Crisis The Twenty Years' Crisis Edward Hallett Carr	0	0 reads
The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939 The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939 Edward Hallett Carr	0	0 reads
The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Ghost Stories	0	0 reads
Ghosts And Scholars Michael Cox Patrick Carleton John Dickson Carr Frederick Cowles Arthur Gray Sheila Hodgson Winifred Galbraith Emma S. Duffin Chico Kidd Shane Leslie R.H. Malden L.T.C. Rolt David G. Rowlands Eleanor Scott Arnold Smith Dermot Chesson Spence Lewis Spence Montague Summers E.G. Swain B. M.R. James Sabine Baring-Gould A.C. Benson R.H. Benson Cecil Binney Andrew Caldecott Ramsey Campbell	0	0 reads
The Meaning of Night: A Confession Michael Cox	0	1 read
Agincourt Agincourt : Jenkin Lloyd, France, 1415 Michael Cox	0	0 reads
Leonardo Da Vinci And His Super-Brain Leonardo Da Vinci And His Super-Brain Michael Cox	0	1 read
Awful Art Michael Cox	0	0 reads
Arte atroce Michael Cox Guido Calza (Translator)	4	1 read
Zonal Marking Michael Cox	0	0 reads
The Meaning of Light by Michael Cox The Meaning of Light by Michael Cox Michael Cox	0	0 reads
El significado de la noche Michael Cox	0	0 reads
The Glass of Time The Glass of Time Michael Cox	0	0 reads
Elvis and His Pelvis Michael Cox	0	0 reads
Why Headless Chickens Run and other Crazy things you need to know Michael Cox	0	0 reads
Ti yan sha yu Michael Cox	0	0 reads
The concise Oxford chronology of English literature Michael Cox	0	0 reads
Smashin' Fashion Michael Cox	0	0 reads
De zin van het duister Michael Cox	0	0 reads
Yi shu jia de mo fa xiu Michael Cox	0	0 reads
La nuit de l'infamie Michael Cox	0	0 reads
The Glass of Time: A Novel Michael Cox	0	0 reads
Le dernier combat Michael Cox	0	0 reads
Victorian Ghost Stories: An Oxford Anthology	0	0 reads