The Book of Kings

One Christmas in the early 1930s - as Adolf Hitler consolidates his total control of the German state - Justin Lothaire, the half-French son of an Algerian revolutionary, travels to Europe on a scholarship and first sees Alpine snow. He meets a fellow Paris student, the Italo-German aristocrat David von Sunda. Thus begins a great university friendship of four, who share David’s apartment on the Rue de Fleurus. The other two Fleurusians are a Faustian philosopher from the Bavarian Alps, Johannes Godard, and the gilded-age New Yorker, Duncan Penn. At their romantic center soon emerges the plain but visionary Helene le Treve and her friend the Hungarian actress Luz Holti, ruined by Hungary’s economic unrest...   more

America's Children

The greatest crime of all, or civilisation’s final maturing? From its genesis, man’s nuclear fire has been damned by moralists as the very Satan, while being rushed to a place of absolute mastery over life on earth by bureaucrats and soldiers.

At the centre of the riddle stands the life of Robert Oppenheimer, who as a literary embodiment - perhaps as much as Ahab’s whale - prefigures man’s place in nature.  Nor does any hunter more prismatically reflect the limits of man’s moral sanity, his enlightened conquest of the Creation, his crisis of guilt, and his struggle for responsibility. It is Oppenheimer whose physics genius, classical education, and ambition enabled America’s establishment of a community of science luminaries on a mesa in New Mexico - Los Alamos, birthplace of Thin Man, Fat Boy, and of the nuclear age... More...

Ahab's Daughter

Kate Cooper is eighteen, the bookish daughter of Cape Cod puritans alarmed by the force of her beauty, under threat in the film era. Still, during the summer before university she is sent to Europe on the Grand Tour, despite the misgivings of her lawyer father, a cold warrior who on weekends flies patrols to defend the purity of American airspace from Soviet incursions.

Trapped in the Aegean as the island armies of Greece mobilise for the Cyprus crisis, Kate is exposed to all the decadence her father’s nightmares. Her guide, Mr. Wind, abandons her for the delights of homoeroticism.  The yacht-born jeunesse - and viellesse - dorée are fascinated by the possibilities of her innocence; Iannis, the old radical, talks of freedom and terror; but  above all Mark Hadley, her feckless distant cousin, awakens beauties in her - sacred and profane - that frighten both Kate and all who observe her... More...