The Champion

Blurb

Charles Pemberton has lived his whole life in the same small town: he went to the best local school, he lived in one of the finest houses and his parents were, effectively, middle-class aristocracy. His quiet life of privileged contentment might well have continued undisturbed, were it not for the arrival of Clark `Large' Rossiter . . . In this uncharismatic town, Large is the biggest personality, equally capable of magnetic charm and all-consuming wrath; he terrorizes the old guard and shakes up the established hierarchy in his relentless pursuit of money, status and, eventually, revenge. Filled with Binding's typical perspicacity, but leavened with a refreshing wit, this is England: greedy, flabby and vulnerable. Through the lives of Charles and Large, Binding chronicles the vertiginous period from Thatcher to Blair - years all the more prescient for their similarity to the current boom and bust. The Champion is literary satire at its savage best. Praise for Anthem `This humane, sweepingly ambitious tale is as close to the Great British Novel as you can get' Esquire `Engrossing . . . a complicated but satisfying plot . . . this novel is rich, moving and real' Observer `Binding sees England as at once a fiction and a necessity, a sustaining ideal and a destroying angel, an excuse and a means of redemption. The effect is by turns eerie, exhilarating, grotesque, revolting and deeply moving . . . [he] has set out to show what fiction can do when it stops worrying at its own importance.' Independent on Sunday Praise for Man Overboard `a consistently entertaining and resourceful novel' Guardian Praise for A Perfect Execution `All human life is there, in a mesmerizing world of its own' Guardian `A brilliant, terrifying and haunting novel . . . it has an almost Dickensian moral clarity . . . a wholly impressive work. It combines all the packed action of a thriller with a vision remarkable for its breadth and for its humanity' Evening Standard `A compelling mixture of murder-mystery, Greek tragedy and love story . . . Set in the post-war period of travelling salesmen and Ruth Ellis look-alikes it asks the enormous, eternal quest