About the book:
Burgess's most ambitious novel, opening with one of the most famous first sentences in English fiction and spanning eighty years of the twentieth century through the memoirs of an aged, gay, expatriate novelist loosely modelled on Somerset Maugham. A novel about good and evil, the Catholic Church, celebrity, colonialism, and the nature of artistic life Burgess throwing everything he had at a single book. Underread relative to its stature.
Condition:
Good secondhand condition.
Some wear on cover.
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About the author:Anthony Burgess (1917 to 1993)
Anthony Burgess was born John Anthony Burgess Wilson on February 25, 1917, in Manchester, England. After serving in the British Army during World War II and working as an education officer in Malaya and Brunei, he returned to Britain and became a full-time writer following a misdiagnosed terminal illness diagnosis. These experiencescolonial life, military service, and a profound engagement with language and musicshaped a prolific, intellectually restless worldview that blended dark humor, linguistic invention, and sharp social commentary.
Burgess achieved international fame with A Clockwork Orange (1962), a dystopian novel written in a dazzling invented slang. His exuberant, erudite stylemarked by wordplay, musical rhythms, and philosophical depthspanned novels, criticism, screenplays, and compositions. Major achievements include a vast body of work (over 50 books), popularizing linguistic experimentation in fiction, and creating one of the most influential novels of the 20th century, later adapted into Stanley Kubricks controversial film.
Influenced by James Joyce, Shakespeare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and his Catholic background, Burgess also drew from his experiences in Southeast Asia and his deep knowledge of music and linguistics. He, in turn, influenced writers such as Will Self, Irvine Welsh, Martin Amis, and authors exploring language, dystopia, and moral ambiguity. Adjacent figures include his contemporaries Kingsley Amis, Graham Greene, and fellow British literary experimenters like B. S. Johnson.
Recurring themes in Burgesss work include free will versus control, the nature of violence and evil, language as identity, the conflict between art and the state, Catholicism, and the redemptive power of music and creativity. Major works include A Clockwork Orange (1962), The Malayan Trilogy (19561959), Earthly Powers (1980), Enderby series, and The Wanting Seed (1962).
In his later years, Burgess lived in Monaco and continued writing prolifically until his death on November 22, 1993. His legacy as one of the most inventive and wide-ranging British writers of the postwar era endures, and his unique contribution lies in using dazzling linguistic virtuosity to explore the darkest and most fundamental questions of human freedom and morality.
