The glittering, sharp work of one of our most incisive and wickedly funny satirists, Isabel Colegate.
The Blackmailer is a savage and sinister comic classic. Judith Lane is the young widow of the war hero Anthony Lane, and an editor at the successful if rather rakish publisher Hanescu Lane & Co. Ltd. The harmonious routine of Judith’s life is interrupted when she receives a visit from Baldwin Reeves, who reveals that Anthony’s wartime adventures were not quite as glorious as the newspaper reports would have her believe. To protect Anthony’s family from scandal, Judith reluctantly acquiesces to the repellent but attractive Reeves’s demands – but both blackmailer and blackmailee soon find themselves out of their depth in ways they could not have anticipated.
‘Combine the slightly offbeat sensibility of Muriel Spark with the milieu of an Iris Murdoch novel and you'll have something of an idea about this witty tale of extortion and romance, all played out against the gin-soaked backdrop of the 1950s London literary scene.’ Lucy Scholes
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The myth of the golden years before the First World War, brought to a tragic and unforeseen end by that war’s outbreak, lingers on despite all the evidence produced by subsequent historians to show...
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