The Pianoplayers is a 1986 novel by Anthony Burgess, drawing heavily on his memories of his father, a pub piano-player. The narrator, Ellen Henshaw, is a prostitute who later becomes a madam. Her father, Billy, plays the piano in the cinema, accompanying silent movies. it was published by Arbor House in the US, and …
The Right to an Answer is a darkly comic 1960 novel by Anthony Burgess, the first of his repatriate years. One of its themes is the disillusionment of the returning exile. The critic William H Pritchard described the novel in a 1966 publication as "surely Burgess' most engaging novel".
The Worm and the Ring is a 1961 novel by English novelist Anthony Burgess, drawing on his time as a teacher at Banbury Grammar School, Oxfordshire, England, in the early 1950s. It is Burgess's version of the Ring Cycle. The Dragon pub in the novel corresponds to the worm and a purloined diary to the ring.
Who, I ask you, wants to drag his bones out of the earth, reclothed in flesh which, in some foul magic of reversal, is regurgitated by the worms, in order that his eyes may see God? Who, I ask you, wants to live for ever? Sadoc son of Azor, a retired shipping clerk lying diseased and dying on the outreaches of the …
Time for a Tiger is part one of Anthony Burgess's Malayan Trilogy The Long Day Wanes, "the first panel of a triptych" set in the twilight of British rule of the peninsula. Dedicated, in Jawi script on the first page of the book, "to all my Malayan friends", it was Burgess's first published work of fiction and appeared …
A brilliantly funny spy novel from the author of the ground-breaking A Clockwork Orange. Denis Hillier is an aging British agent based in Yugoslavia. His old school friend Roper has defected to the USSR to become one of the evil empire's great scientific minds. Hillier must bring Roper back to England or risk losing …