Super-Cannes

by Ali Smith (Introduction), Ali Smith (Introduction), J. G. Ballard (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2014

  $4.48

  A high-tech business park on the Mediterranean is the setting for a most disturbing crime in this reissue featuring a new introduction by Ali Smith. A disturbing mystery awaits Paul and Jane Sinclair when they arrive in Eden-Olympia, a high-tech business park in the hills above Cannes. Jane is to work as a doctor for those who live in this ultra-modern workers' paradise. But what caused her predecessor to go on a shooting spree that made headlines around the world? As Paul investigates, he begins to uncover a thriving subculture of crime that is spiralling out of control. Both novel of ideas and complex thriller, 'Super-Cannes' is an extraordinary satire from the author of 'Empire of the Sun', 'The Drowned World' and 'Crash'. This edition is part of a new commemorative series of Ballard's works, featuring introductions from a number of his admirers (including Robert Macfarlane, Hari Kunzru, James Lever and Zadie Smith) and brand-new cover designs from the artist Stanley Donwood.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2000

  $8.27

  A high-tech business park on the Mediterranean coast is the setting for crime of the most disturbing kind in this extraordinary new bestseller from the writer widely regarded as Britain's No 1 living novelist -- author of Cocaine Nights. Paul Sinclair and his bright young wife Jane drive down to the south of France in his vintage Jaguar so that she can take up a post as doctor to the new community of Eden-Olympia, just above Cannes. Multinational companies and their sharpest executives have converged on this high-tech business park, tempted by its location and facilities, by its efficiency and its security, and by something far more disquieting. According to its resident psychologist, Wilder Penrose, the community is 'a huge experiment in how to hothouse the future...an ideas laboratory for the new millennium'. In such a place, he claims, one is absolutely free to 'board the escalator of possibility'. Jane does just that. But Paul hesitates before boarding, pausing to look around. He finds what he sees mystifying and unsettling; when he learns that he and his wife have been housed in a villa whose previous occupant had been driven to massacre notable executives on a horrific shooting spree, he begins to look under the surface. For all the dawn-to-dusk hard work, for all its productivity and profits, Eden-Olympia is the venue for games of the most serious sort. So Paul joins in...On one level Super-Cannes is a romantic fable of a husband's search for a lost wife. But far larger issues are involved that go to the heart of a new kind of social pathology. J.G. Ballard, Britain's most consistently daring and surprising novelist, has again brought his powers of discovery and dissent, curiosity and wit, to a tale as pacey, gripping and illuminating as his previous bestseller, Cocaine Nights.

• New

  Paperback
  2002

  $23.98

  Eden-Olympia is more than just a multinational business park, it is a virtual city-state in itself, built for the most elite high-tech industries. Isolated and secure, the residents lack nothing, yet one day, a doctor at the clinic goes on a suicidal shooting spree. Dr. Jane Sinclair is hired as his replacement, and her husband Paul uncovers the dangerous psychological vents that maintain Eden-Olympia's smoothly-running surface.