[2] Kneale was brought up in Barnes, attended Latymer Upper School in West London, and then studied modern history at Magdalen College, Oxford.
[4] Kneale's first novel, Whore Banquets, tells the story of an Englishman whose affair with a Tokyo woman brings him into the realm of Japanese organized crime.
English Passengers tells the story of a religious-scientific expedition that seeks to find the Garden of Eden in Tasmania, a land whose aboriginal culture had been experiencing brutal destruction at the hands of British settlers and convicts.
Interviewed in 2001, Kneale said that J. G. Farrell was a writer whom he particularly admired, as one who "wrote about the British Empire – and scathingly – back in the 1970s, when few in Britain wanted to think about the uglier parts of their country's past.
One of the stories, "Powder", about a failed lawyer whose life changes when he chances upon a stash of cocaine and a mobile phone, was made into the French feature film, Une Pure Affaire.
Pilgrims is a comic novel set in medieval times, mainly in 1289, about a group of heterogeneous individuals who band together on a journey from England to Rome on a religious pilgrimage, each with his or her own intentions.
'The Camerman' is a fictional account of a road journey across Europe to Rome, by Julius Sewell, a film cameraman who has been released from a mental hospital in Wales following a psychotic episode, together with his dysfunctional and politically extreme family.