The Champion

by TimBinding (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2012

  $3.30

  Charles Pemberton has lived all his life in the same small town. It's been a good life, a safe life. Then, sauntering boldly into this privileged world, comes Clark 'Large' Rossiter, a working-class lad with an easy charm and insatiable ambition. Large is out to upset the established order of things. He wants it all: money, status, the most desirable women -- revenge. But Charles and the old guard aren't ready to lie down just yet, and this portrait of the years between Thatcher and Blair catches an England unleashed from restraint, at war with itself and heading for a fall. This ferociously funny novel is great English satire at its savage best.

• Used

  Paperback
  2011

  $3.30

  Charles Pemberton has lived his whole life in the same small town: he went to the best local school, he lived in one of the finest houses and his parents were, effectively, middle-class aristocracy. His quiet life of privileged contentment might well have continued undisturbed, were it not for the arrival of Clark 'Large' Rossiter ...In this uncharismatic town, Large is the biggest personality, equally capable of magnetic charm and all-consuming wrath; he terrorizes the old guard and shakes up the established hierarchy in his relentless pursuit of money, status and, eventually, revenge. Filled with Binding's typical perspicacity, but leavened with a refreshing wit, this is England: greedy, flabby and vulnerable. Through the lives of Charles and Large, Binding chronicles the vertiginous period from Thatcher to Blair years all the more prescient for their similarity to the current boom and bust. The Champion is literary satire at its savage best. Praise for Anthem 'This humane, sweepingly ambitious tale is as close to the Great British Novel as you can get' Esquire 'Engrossing ...a complicated but satisfying plot ...this novel is rich, moving and real' Observer 'Binding sees England as at once a fiction and a necessity, a sustaining ideal and a destroying angel, an excuse and a means of redemption. The effect is by turns eerie, exhilarating, grotesque, revolting and deeply moving ...[he] has set out to show what fiction can do when it stops worrying at its own importance.' Independent on Sunday Praise for Man Overboard 'a consistently entertaining and resourceful novel' Guardian Praise for A Perfect Execution 'All human life is there, in a mesmerizing world of its own' Guardian 'A brilliant, terrifying and haunting novel ...it has an almost Dickensian moral clarity ...a wholly impressive work. It combines all the packed action of a thriller with a vision remarkable for its breadth and for its humanity' Evening Standard 'A compelling mixture of murder-mystery, Greek tragedy and love story ...Set in the post-war period of travelling salesmen and Ruth Ellis look-alikes it asks the enormous, eternal questions in language that is both lyrical and barbaric' Sunday Telegraph Praise for Island Madness 'The most stimulating and also the most exciting novel I read this year ...Part thriller, part love story, and wholly engrossing' Antonia Fraser, Sunday Telegraph 'Rewarding subtlety and insight into the best and worst of human nature' Jane Shilling, The Times