Book description
Byrne is Anthony Burgess's final work: an epic verse novel.
Michael Byrne is a minor modern composer with greater talent in bed
than in the concert hall. A bigamist, a charmer and a thug, Byrne
sells his talents as a composer and painter, ending up in Hitler's
Third Reich. He moves opportunistically from country to country and
from bed to bed, leaving a small tribe of children across the globe.
He then vanishes and the story passes to his children, including twin
sons, one a doubting priest, the other sick of an incapacitating
disease, who move across the troubled face of contemporary Europe
before encountering their father in one final apocalyptic
confrontation. Brilliantly readable, enormously funny and full of
passion and energy, it is also Anthony Burgess's last powerful
statement of life and art.
Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917. He served in the army
from 1940 to 1954 before becoming a colonial education officer. It was
while he held this post that doctors told him he would die, and he
decided to try to live by writing. A prolific and respected author,
Burgess died in 1993.
