Victor, an eighty-year-old multimillionaire, surveys his empire from the remoteness of his cloud-capped penthouse. Expensively insulated from the outside world, he nonetheless finds that memories of his impoverished childhood will not be kept so easily at bay. Focusing on the one area of vitality and chaos that remains in the streets below him, he formulates a plan to leave a mark on the city - one as indelible and disruptive as the mark the city left on him.
'A deeply satisfying read, in which each well-turned phrase resounds in every finely tuned sentence' Mail on Sunday
'Presents his heavily politicised vision at its most ambitious and also at its most Ballard-like' Irish Times
'One of the most beautifully written books in years' Sunday Telegraph Jim Crace is the author of Continent, The Gift of Stones, Arcadia, Signals of Distress, Quarantine (1998 Whitbread Novel of the Year; shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Being Dead (2001 National Book Critics Circle Award), The Devil's Larder, Six and The Pesthouse. His novels have been translated into 26 languages. In 1999 Jim Crace was elected to the Royal Society of Literature.
