Brilliant Creatures

The debut novel from much-loved writer, poet and broadcaster Clive James, Brilliant Creatures is a bold, hilarious satire of the media industry.

'Clive James doesn't miss a trick' – The Times

Lancelot Windhover used to be famous, but that was a long, long time ago. And so now, when his extramarital affair is on the path to becoming a subject for the gossip columns, it is at least some consolation to know he is remembered.

A romping satire of London literary life in the Eighties, Brilliant Creatures describes an incestuous circle of writers, journalists, publishers, and consultants: a network of characters whose chatter and manoeuvres are so terribly important to one another, it is surely inevitable that someone will write a novel about it all. With critical notes from Peter C. Bartelski, the polymath don of Sydney, Sussex and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, this is that novel.

'James is up on a tightrope of style, wobbling away, relentlessly funny. James's achievement, beyond the fizz and the jokes, is to have created characters who begin to be likeable, and who make and live with a decision worth pondering' – London Review of Books