About the Author

Brian Aldiss, OBE, is a fiction and science fiction writer, poet, playwright, critic, memoirist and artist. He was born in Norfolk in 1925. After leaving the army, Aldiss worked as a bookseller, which provided the setting for his first book, The Brightfount Diaries (1955). His first published science fiction work was the story ‘Criminal Record’, which appeared in Science Fantasy in 1954. Since then he has written nearly 100 books and over 300 short stories.

Reviews

‘Excited me more than anything else I’ve read this year.’ ANTHONY BURGESS ‘A long, handsome ingenious novel about war and peace, very funny, very sad, full of closely seen, closely thought detail, wise exotic and entertaining.’ IRIS MURDOCH The mid-life crisis, with its fumblings, fudgings and miraculous accidents of self-knowledge, has seldom been better portrayed’. OBSERVER ‘Brian Aldiss works with such zest and gaiety.’ NINA BAWDEN ‘Full of goodies… funny, human, tough, irresistibly lively.’ FINANCIAL TIMES