King of the City - Softcover

Michael Moorcock

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684861402 ISBN 13: 9780684861401

Publisher: Scribner, 2000

Synopsis

Michael Moorcock, returns with the story of the times and trials of Dennis Dover, former rock guitarist, photojournalist, paparazzo, and loyal denizen of Mother London, and his brilliant, beautiful, and socially conscious cousin, Rosie Beck. Since childhood they have been inseparable, delighting in the daily discoveries of a life with no limits. But now a powerful, unstoppable force that consumes the past indiscriminately, leaving nothing of substance in its wake, threatens the metropolis that nurtured them.

The terminator is named John Barbican Begg. A hanger-on from Denny and Rosie's youth, he has become the morally corrupt center of their London, and the richest, most rapacious creature in the Western Hemisphere, with but one goal: to devour the entire world. And their only choices left are to join in, drop out ... or plot to destroy him.

About this title

About the Author:

Michael Moorcock has published more than seventy novels, and there are more than twenty million copies of his books in print worldwide. Among the major literary prizes Moorcock has received are the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Nebula Award. He and his wife divide their time between homes in London, Texas, and Spain.

From Publishers Weekly:

Like Gargantua or Tristram Shandy, Dennis "Denny" Dover is born with all the portents of some future myth. "I was born in Mustard Street. In the top back room of the Hare and Hounds. On 21 December 1952. My dad... was the last real Londoner to be hanged for murder." We first meet Denny, the narrator of Moorcock's scurrilously exuberant London novel, on a downer. He has scored a coup, photographing a supposedly dead English billionaire, Johnny Barbican Begg, enjoying illicit, copulatory bliss with an English countess on a Bahamian island. Denny's scoop is outscooped, however, by Princess Di's car wreck, which not only chases everything else off the headlines, but puts paparazzi in bad odor with the public, forcing Denny to hide out in an English resort town, Skerring. In the long flashback taking up most of the book, we go from the early '70s remnants of a swinging London, with Denny a cult rock and roll guitarist, to his news photography in Rwanda and then his paparazzo days. At the heart of Denny's story is his love for his cousin Rosie Beck, and for working-class London. Rosie metamorphoses from a radical to Barbican Begg's wife and, perhaps, the plotter of his downfall. Moorcock includes real people, like Johnny Lydon, and a host of fictional characters, like the Quentin Crisp-like actor, Norrie Stripling, as though the book were Moorcock's version of the Sgt. Pepper album cover: private favorites and public enemies. Fans of Moorcock's science fiction might find the references hard going, but readers of his Booker Prize-nominated Mother London will enjoy the novel's angry rant against the vices of the age.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0684861402
• ISBN 13: 9780684861401
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432