Best Selling Books by Anthony Burgess

This novel is one of Anthony Burgess''s most accessible and entertaining works. By turns bawdy, raucous, tender and bittersweet, and full of music and songs, this is a warm and affectionate portrait of the working-class Lancashire of the 1920s and 1930s that he knew from his own early life.

BYRNE is Anthony Burgess''s fianl work: an epic verse novel. It tells the story of a rampant Irish artist who, in the early years of this century, goes rapidly to the bad, philandering at every opportunity, selling his talents as a composer and painter, and ending up in Hitler''s Third Reich. He then vanishes and the story passes to his children, including twin sons, one a doubting priest, the other sick of an incapacitating disease, who move across the troubled face of contemporary Europe before encountering their father in one final apocalyptic confrontation. Brilliantly readable, enormously funny and full of passion and energy, it is also Anthony Burgess''s last powerful statement of life and art.

Revolutionary Sonnets explores themes of violence and love, pretensions and emotion, sex and war and is both sobering and funny.

Anthony Burgess draws on his love of music and history in this novel he called “elephantine fun” to write. A grand and affectionate tragicomic symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte that teases and reweaves Napoleon’s life into a pattern borrowed—in liberty, equality, and fraternity—from Beethoven’s Third “Eroica” Symphony, in this rich, exciting, bawdy, and funny novel Anthony Burgess has pulled out all the stops for a virtuoso performance that is literary, historical, and musical.

Enderby is a dyspeptic British poet, 56 years old, and The Clockwork Testament is an account of his last day alive. The day in question is a cold one in February. He spends it in New York City, where for the past several months he''s been working as a visiting professor of English literature and composing a long poem about St. Augustine and Pelagius.

''One of the most productive, imaginative and risk-taking of writers... It is a clever, sexually explicit, fast-moving, full blooded yarn'' Irish Times A Dead Man in Deptford re-imagines the riotous life and suspicious death of Christopher Marlowe. Poet, lover and spy, Marlowe must negotiate the pressures placed upon him by theatre, Queen and country. Burgess brings this dazzling figure to life and pungently evokes Elizabethan England.

"Burgessian" Rome. Like the locations of many of his novels, Rome here takes on a texture that can only exist in Burgess. The plot concerns Mr. John Beard, a hack writer having a hell of a time (so to speak) in the Eternal City. Full of Nabokovian autoparody (a "better" writer visits Mr. Beard and pounds away at some of Burgess''s own aesthetics) and some fairly relentless lascivity, "Beard''s Roman Women" will be appreciated most by the Burgess-fanatics. --A Customer at Amazon.com.

The daring dystopian satire that inspired one of the most notorious films ever made, beautifully reimagined as part of the Penguin Essentials series ''Every generation should discover this book'' Time Out ________________ In this nightmare vision of youth in revolt, fifteen-year-old Alex and his friends set out on a diabolical orgy of robbery, rape, torture and murder. Alex is jailed for his teenage delinquency and the State tries to reform him - but at what cost? Experiment of language? Social prophecy? Black comedy? A Clockwork Orange is all of these. Dazzling and transgressive, this frightening fable about good and evil asks the meaning of human freedom. ________________ ''A gruesomely witty cautionary tale'' Time ''Not only about man''s violent nature and his capacity to choose between good and evil. It is about the excitements and intoxicating effects of language'' Daily Telegraph ''I do not know of any other writer who has done as much with language . . . a very funny book'' William S. Burroughs ''One of the cleverest and most original writers of his generation'' The Times

Dr. Edwin Spindrift, a linguist, decides to escape from the hospital the night before his brain tumor surgery is scheduled and discovers a world of people exists outside his universe of words.

In this magnificent portrait if Shakespeare''s world, the life of England''s greatest playwright is recreated by one of the great novelists of our day.

Homage to Mozart on the occasion of the bicentennial of his death with celestial dialogue, an opera libretto, fragments of film script, and part rumination on the mystery of music.

Set in postwar Malaya at the time when people and governments alike are bemused and dazzled by the turmoil of independence, this three-part novel is rich in hilarious comedy and razor-sharp in observation. The protagonist of the work is Victor Crabbe, a teacher in a multiracial school in a squalid village, who moves upward in position as he and his wife maintain a steady decadent progress backward.

ANNIVERSARY GOLD EDITIONA Clockwork Orange, novel by Anthony Burgess, published in 1962. Set in a dismal dystopia, it is the first-person account of a juvenile delinquent who undergoes state-sponsored psychological rehabilitation for his aberrant behaviour. The novel satirizes extreme political systems that are based on opposing models of the perfectibility or incorrigibility of humanity. Written in a futuristic slang vocabulary invented by Burgess, in part by adaptation of Russian words, it was his most original and best-known work. The film adaptation (1971) by Stanley Kubrick was also widely acclaimed, though not without its critics, especially due to the film''s many violent and sexually explicit scenes.SUMMARY: Burgess'' chilling novel was partly inspired by the seaside fights of the mods and rockers of the early 1960s. It follows the exploits of a gang of particularly violent teenagers--the Droogs--through the eyes of one member, the Beethoven-loving, 15-year-old Alex (he is older in the film version). Their drug-fueled orgies (milk spiked with narcotics is the drug of choice) and acts of robbery, rape, and torture are detailed with enjoyment in Burgess'' made-up slang, Nadsat. When an attempted robbery goes wrong and Alex commits murder, he is caught and sentenced to 14 years in prison. Unable to cope with life behind bars, Alex volunteers to undergo an experimental program called the Ludovico Technique, unaware that it is a brutal form of aversion therapy (conducted by forcing Alex to watch films of Nazi atrocities set to Beethoven''s Ninth Symphony) that will brainwash him into being physically sick if he even thinks about committing a crime.Here lie the main ethical questions in the book: whether it is better for a man to decide to be bad than to be forced to be good, and whether forcibly suppressing Alex''s free will is acceptable. Additionally, does the state have the right to use violence against some individuals in order to protect the majority?After his release from prison, Alex finds that a side-effect of the treatment means that he can no longer bear to listen to Beethoven, which, together with the deprivation of his free will, leads him to attempt suicide by throwing himself out of a window. He is unsuccessful, but his free will returns, and he is free to revel in the idea of violence again. It is at this point that the version of the book published in the U.S., on which Kubrick''s film was based, stops. However, the final chapter of the UK edition holds out hope for Alex''s redemption.More than 40 years after it was written, this story retains its ability to shock, sicken, and stir an audience.

Offers a portrait of the author''s first forty years, from his childhood in Manchester to the moment when, having been told he was dying, he began to write seriously