Earthly Powers.

BURGESS, Anthony.

$450.00

Item Number: 115443

New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

First edition of this epic masterpiece by the author of A Clockwork Orange, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Octavo, original half cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “To Jose Matos, A man in search of a magician Anthony Burgess.” Near fine in a near fine dust jacket with a touch of wear to the spine. Jacket design by One Plus One Studio.

In Earthly Powers Burgess created his masterpiece. At its center are two twentieth-century men who represent different kinds of power—Kenneth Toomey, a past-his-prime author of mediocre fiction, a man who has outlived his contemporaries to survive into, bitter, luxurious old age, living in self-exile on Malta; and Don Carlo Campanati, a man of God, eventually of church revolution and a candidate for sainthood beloved Pope, who rises through the Vatican as a shrewd manipulator to become the architect. Through the lives of these two modern men Burgess explores the very essence of power in a narrative that spans from Hollywood, to Dublin, Nairobi, Paris, and beyond. "Burgess is the great postmodern storehouse of British writing-an important experimentalist; an encyclopaedic amasser, but also a maker of form; a playful comic, with a dark gloom" (Malcolm Bradbury)