King of the City - Softcover

Moorcock, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684861445 ISBN 13: 9780684861449

Publisher: SIMON & SCHUSTER @ TRADE, 2001

Synopsis

The death of Princess Di heralded a spring clean of the soul. And the dirt we wanted off our coffee tables was the kind of salacious exposure tabloid paparazzo photographer Denny Dover had made a fortune out of. Now he's out of work and moving to the godforsaken wastes of Skerring on the South coast of England to lick his wounds. A former rock star and existential maverick this East End lad-made-good lived it up with the best of them. But his childhood friend, hugely wealthy magnate Sir John Barbican-Begg (deceased, allegedly) is resurrecting events from a past littered with dysfunction and greed, sex, rock and roll and a ton of drugs. Denny's life encapsulates the fevered underground of a London teeming with contradiction and ambivalence, subversion and rage. Moorcock's hugely entertaining follow-up to his masterpiece MOTHER LONDON captures the spirit of our age as we stagger into the new millennium.

About this title

About the Author:

Michael Moorcock was born in England in 1939. He has written many novels and has won the GUARDIAN Fiction Award for CONDITION OF MUSAK and was short-listed for the Whitbread Prize for MOTHER LONDON. In recent years he has achieved an international reputation and is now recognised as a major contemporary novelist. A longtime resident of London, he now lives near Austin, Texas, with his wife.

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: SIMON & SCHUSTER @ TRADE
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0684861445
• ISBN 13: 9780684861449
• Binding: Paperback