Book description
'Crowded, crammed, bursting with manic erudition, garlicky puns,
omnilingual jokes... which meshes the real and personalised history of
the twentieth century'
Martin Amis
Kenneth Toomey is an eminent novelist of dubious talent; Don Carlo
Campanati is a man of God, a shrewd manipulator who rises through the
Vatican to become the architect of church revolution and a candidate
for sainthood. These two men are linked not only by family ties but by
a common understanding of mankind's frailties. In this epic
masterpiece, Anthony Burgess plumbs the depths of the essence of power
and the lengths men will go for it.
Burgess is the great postmodern storehouse of British writing-an
important experimentalist; an encyclopaedic amasser, but also a maker of
form; a playful comic, with a dark gloom -- Malcolm Bradbury Enormous
imagination and vitality - a huge book in every way Sunday Times A
hellfire tract thrown down by a novelist at the peak of his powers The
Times In all ways, a remarkable book -- Paul Theroux Wildly funny-a
masterpiece -- A. S. Byatt Daily Mail 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.
