The Pentecost Papers

'Gloriously inventive, wonderfully entertaining, wickedly knowing . . . Read it and revel' JOHN BANVILLE
'The unsung hero of his generation of novelists . . . Astute, funny and heartbreaking' TANYA GOLD
Corruption, destruction, danger and murder: Welcome to the murky world of the super-rich.
Timothy 'Timbo' Smith, part-time healer and self-styled security analyst, travels down the dark canyons of global capitalism, from short-selling scams in the City to the depleted rainforests of Brazil.
His accomplices in this irresistible safari through the late modern world are two reformed alcoholics, the lovely and brilliant Lee 'Lethal' Thorold, and her husband Professor Luke Deverill, lecherous Oxford philosopher and caustic computer wizard. Their misadventures are followed at a bewildered distance by the played-out diplomatic correspondent Dickie Pentecost, who tags along mostly because Timbo is the only man who can cure his agonising back and is always one step behind the Machiavellian actions of those who precede him.
Readers who loved the author's earlier stinging satire, Making Nice, will find this novel an even more telling takedown of the way we live now but pretend we don't.
Praise for the author:
'Mount's storytelling is irresistible' LITERARY REVIEW
'One of our finest prose stylists' DAILY TELEGRAPH
'[Mount] exposes such cold truths with such warmth - I am in eternal awe of his writing, wherever I find it' MARINA HYDE

Ferdinand Mount was born in 1939, the son of a steeplechase jockey, and brought up on Salisbury Plain. After being educated at Eton and Oxford, he made various false starts as a children's nanny, a gossip columnist, bagman to Selwyn Lloyd, and leader-writer on the doomed Daily Sketch. He later surfaced, slightly to his surprise and everyone else's, as head of Margaret Thatcher's Policy Unit and later editor of The Times Literary Supplement. He is married with three children and three grandchildren and has lived in Islington for half his life. Apart from political columns and essays, he has written a six-volume series of novels, A Chronicle of Modern Twilight, which began with The Man Who Rode Ampersand, based on his father's racing life, and included Of Love And Asthma (he is a temporarily retired asthmatic), which won the Hawthornden Prize for 1992. He also writes what he calls Tales of History and Imagination, including Umbrella, which the historian Niall Ferguson called 'quite simply the best historical novel in years'. His most recent titles for Bloomsbury Continuum include Big Caesars and Little Caesars, Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca and the novel Making Nice.