The Paper Eater (29 page)
Authors: Liz Jensen
ARK BABY
Since the year all British women became infertile, Bobby Sullivan’s London veterinary clinic has been packed with primate ‘children’ and, speaking as an alpha male, he’s sick to death of them. Hoping to reincarnate himself, he moves north, but finds there is no escape from the Darwinian imperative – or from the sexual pull of the luscious twins Rose and Blanche. As the legacy of the girls’ ancestor, Victorian freak Tobias Phelps, begins to connect with a century of history, religion, and evolutionary theory, new hope looms for the nation’s future. Pointing the finger of destiny firmly at Bobby...
‘Superb … A complex, intelligent novel which draws upon a vast array of ideas without ever losing coherence … magnificently crowded, wonderfully funny fiction’
DAILY TELEGRAPH
THE NINTH LIFE OF LOUIS DRAX
Nine-year-old Louis Drax is a problem child. He’s bright, precocious, deceitful and dangerously, disturbingly accident prone. On a family day out it seems almost predestined that something will happen. But this time it is worse than anyone imagined. When Louis falls over a cliff into a ravine and lapses into a deep coma, his father vanishes and his mother is paralysed by shock. In a clinic in Provence, Dr Dannachet tries to coax Louis back to consciousness, but the boy defies medical logic and the doctor is drawn into the dark heart of Louis’ buried world. Only Louis holds the key to the mystery and he can’t communicate. Or can he?
‘A wonderfully unsettling psychological thriller’
MAIL ON SUNDAY
WAR CRIMES FOR THE HOME
‘You know what they say about GIs and English girls’ knickers,’ ran the wartime joke, ‘One Yank and they’re off.’ When Gloria met Ron, he was an American pilot who thought nothing of getting hit by shrapnel in the cockpit. She was working in a munitions factory in Bristol during the Blitz, but still found time to grab what she wanted. Ciggies. Sex. American soldiers. But war has an effect on people. Gloria did all sorts of things she wouldn’t normally do – evil things, some of them – because she might be dead tomorrow. Or someone might. Now, fifty years on, it’s payback time. In her old folks’ home, Gloria is forced to remember the real truth about her and Ron, and confront the secret at the heart of her dramatic home front story. In a gripping, vibrant evocation of wartime Britain, Liz Jensen explores the dark impulses of women whose war crimes are committed on the home front, in the name of sex, survival, greed and love.
‘Breathtakingly coarse, wryly amusing and gut-wrenchingly tragic’
MARIE CLAIRE
MY DIRTY LITTLE BOOK OF STOLEN TIME
In fin-de-siecle Copenhagen, part-time prostitute Charlotte and her lumpen sidekick, Fru Schleswig, have taken on jobs as cleaning ladies of dubious talent to tide them over the harsh winter of 1897. But the home of their neurotic new employer, the widow Krak, soon reveals itself to be riddled with dark secrets – including the existence of a demonic machine rumoured to swallow people alive. Rudely catapulted into twenty-first-century London, the hapless duo discover a whole new world of glass, labour-saving devices and hectic, impossible romance.
‘Unashamedly gleeful: a kind of topsy-turvy Jane Eyre with added time travel ...
Sit back, suspend your disbelief, and enjoy’
DAILY MAIL
EGG DANCING
With only a schizophrenic mother and a militantly hostile sister for backup, Hazel Sugden, food-splattered mum and queen of low self-esteem, is palpably unfit to save the future of mankind as we know it. But when embryology, psychiatry and religion clash over the miracle designer drug Genetic Choice, the dysfunctional trio is propelled into action with explosively comic results…
‘An assured, hilarious and insightful novel … propelled along by the comic rhythm of the writing, you’re carried on a crazy journey you won’t be sorry you took’
TIME OUT
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EGG DANCING
ARK BABY
WAR CRIMES FOR THE HOME
THE NINTH LIFE OF LOUIS DRAX
MY DIRTY LITTLE BOOK OF STOLEN TIME
First published 2000
This electronic edition published in June 2010
by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 2000 by Liz Jensen
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY
A CIP catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
ISBN 978 1 4088 1362 1
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