Pleasured

by P Hensher (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1999

  $3.42

  Philip Hensher is one of our most acclaimed younger novelists and critics. His first two novels OTHER LULUS and KITCHEN VENOM were highly praised, and his reviews in the Spectator, the Mail and elsewhere have made him a highly visible and controversial literary pundit. This, his new novel, is his most ambitious so far. Set in Berlin in the last 80s, before the Wall came down, it tells the story of Heinrich Himmler, a restless young man working part-time as a waiter, who takes on a mysterious errand for the shaady Mr Picker. Picker, a spy for an unspecified government believes that East Berliners will be revolutionised not by political activism, but by pleasure. He pays Heinrich Himmler to deliver $50, 000 of free Ecstasy to East Berlin and hopes to watch the effect of the tabs as east Germany discovers a new world of bliss. But the plan goes seriously awry. Very funny, very unsettling, this is a novel that recalls Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, but has a sophistication and an edge all of its own.

• Used

  Paperback
  2004

  $3.42

  Perhaps the best novel yet about the collapse of the Berlin Wall, `at once cinematic, intimate and epic' (The Times) - from Granta Best of British novelist Philip Hensher, author of the bestselling The Mulberry Empire.

  'Pleasured begins on New Year's Eve, 1988, when a car breaks down on a road connecting West Germany and West Berlin. Inside the car are an unlikely trio - Peter Picker, an Englishman, and the two strangers to whom he is giving a lift, a student who calls herself Daphne and Friedrich Kaiser. The novel tracks their intertwined fates in the year that follows. It is, of course, no ordinary year, and it is not only the Berlin Wall which has collapsed by its end... Distinctive and consistently appealing, Philip Hensher's novels are full of mysteries to be uncovered, lies to collapse, and secrets to be dramatically revealed.' Guardian