Admired by writers and critics, less interested in broad appeal than in precision, moral ambiguity and absurdity. 

Lantern Lecture gathers together a sequence of interconnected novellas that move between crime, satire, psychological comedy and social observation. Characters drift across stories, chance encounters reverberate, and apparently ordinary situations reveal themselves as quietly grotesque.

The title novella draws on the real-life Black Panther kidnapping case, but throughout the collection sensational events matter less than the ways people misunderstand one another, construct elaborate private logics, and stumble through systems of class, family and desire. Even the most unlikely premises are anchored by an acute psychological realism.

This is a collection for readers who enjoy the dry intelligence of Alan Hollinghurst, Penelope Fitzgerald or early Ian McEwan, but with a distinctly eccentric comic register. One of the strongest early books by a writer whose fiction deserves wider attention.

Picador paperback, 1982. First Picador edition, following the 1981 Faber & Faber first edition. Very good condition. Light shelf wear and rubbing to the covers, faint stain to the preliminary copyright page, with a firm binding and otherwise clean, bright pages.