Ned Beauman’s stunningly inventive, exceptionally funny and dangerously unsteady historical novel doesn’t even know what year it is.

West Berlin. Egon Loeser is looking back over his strange and eventful life, from the experimental theatres of Berlin to the absinthe bars of Paris. Two questions still gnaw away at him. Was it really a deal with Satan that claimed the life of his hero, the great Renaissance stage designer Adriano Lavicini? And, perhaps even more importantly, why can’t a handsome, clever, charming, modest guy like him ever just get laid?

Longlisted
The Man Booker Prize 2012
Published by
Sceptre
Publication date
Ned Beauman

Ned Beauman

About the Author

Ned Beauman’s novels – four to date – have come about, he says, as a result of ‘the struggle I feel personally as a writer between my bourgeois realist literary fiction side and my pulp side’.
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