Tom Sharpe

This sequel to Tom Sharpe's classic comic novel Porterhouse Blue takes the reader back to the hilarious goings- on at Porterhouse College. Though as cunning as ever, the formidable Skullion- previously head porter, now elevated to Master- is showing signs of physical frailty after his stroke. So the tricky business of appointing a new Master must start all over again. Meanwhile the College's monstrous debts refuse to go away, and a sinister American media mogul seems determined to make a television documentary on the premises, destroying part of the chapel in the process. Moreover, the widow of the previous Master is convinced that her husband was murdered, so she plants an agent in the Senior Common Room to dig up an unpleasant truth that everyone else would prefer kept under the carpet. Faced with such continuing crises, the instinct of the true Porterhouse man is to reach for the bottle- or to fall back on the subtle and traditional Cambridge skills of blackmail and kidnap. But will those be enough?

Tom Sharpe's second South African novel and a brilliant follow- up to Riotous Assembly Once again the setting is Piemburgem, the deceptively peaceful- looking capital of Zululand, where Kommandant van Heerden, Konstabel Els and Luitenant Vekramp continue to terrorise true Englishman and even truer Zulus in their relentless search for a perfect South Africa. While that great Anglophile, Kommandant van Heerden, gropes his way towards attaining true 'Englishness' in the company of the eccentric Dornford Yates Club, Luitenant Verkramp, whose hatred of all things English is surpassed only by his fear of sex, sets in motion an experiment in mass chastity, with the help of the redoubtable lady psychiatrist Dr von Blimenstein, which has remarkable and quite unforeseen results. The Kommandant, hunting the fox in the Aardvark mountains, succumbs to the bizarre charms of Mrs Heathcote- Kilkoon, as Luitenant Verkramp's essays in counter- espionage backfire in the bird sanctuary. Once more, Konstabel Els, homicidal to the last, saves the day- or what's left of it- in one of the most savage hunts ever chronicled in fiction.

SUMMARY: When Miss Hazelstone Of Jacaranda Park Kills Her Zulu Cook In A Sensational Crime Passionel, The Gallant Members Of The South African Police Force Are Soon On The Scene: Kommandant Van Heerden, Whose Secret Longing For The Heart Of An English Gentleman Leads To The Most Memorable Transplant Operation Yet Recorded; Luitenant Verkramp Of The Security Branch, Ever Active In The Pursuit Of Communist Cells; Konstabel Els, With His Propensity For Shooting First And Not Thinking Later - And Also For Forcing Himself Upon African Women In A Manner Legally Reserved For Male Members Of Their Own Race. In The Course Of The Strange Events Which Follow, We Encounter Some Very Esoteric Perversions When The Kommandant Is Held Captive In Miss Hazelstone'S Remarkable Rubber Room; And Some Even More Amazing Perversions Of Justice When Miss Hazelstone'S Brother, The Bishop Of Barotseland, Is Sentenced To Be Hanged On The Ancient Gallows In The Local Prison. Not A 'Political' Novel In Any Previously Imagined Sense, Riotous Assembly Provides A Completely Fresh Approach To The South African Scene - An Approach At Once Startling In Its Deadpan Savagery And Outrageously Funny.

SUMMARY: A Totally Filthy Novel To Put The Literary World In Spasms - But Sure To Make A Shameful Pile Of Money In America. Frensic, A Literary Agent With A 'Nose For A Bestseller' (As Well As Port And Snuff), Places This Hot Property With Hutchmeyer - Who Is The Least Respected Publisher In The World. And A Gullible Author Is Despatched Across The Atlantic For A Chaotic Publicity Tour.

Timothy Brights doesn't exactly live up to his name. Brought up to regard copious flows of money as his birthright, he can't understand why the funds have been cut off, nor why friends he recruited as Lloyds' Names no longer want to talk to him. When gambling fails, Timothy turns to embezzlement, but it's the lesser offence of helping himself to some strangely aromatic tobacco that propels him up the motorway and into bed with the Chief Constable's wife. The Chief Constable has just survived charges of bribery and perjury and is not too concerned that his efforts to dispose of Timothy involve false imprisonment, breaking and entering, and a spot of GBH. It is only when the Chief tries to frame his old adversary, the upright Miss Midden, hat things begin to go seriously wrong as his underhand ploy opens up the way to spectacular mayhem.

First meet young Lockhart Flawse from Flawse Hall on Flawse Fell. Then hear his story of gassing, whipping, blowing up, killing and stuffing - in fact, the everyday tale of a wild child of nature plunged into the genteel mock-Tudor world of surburban Surrey.

In this, the second of Tom Sharpe's chronicles about Henry Wilt, our hero is no longer the victim of his own uncontrolled fantasies. As Head of a reconstituted Liberal Studies Department he has assumed power without authority at the Fenland College of Arts & Technology and the fantasies he now confronts are those of political bigots and reactionary bureaucrats- in addition to his wife's enthusiasm for every Organic Alternative under the compost heap and the insistence of his quadruplets on looking at every problem with an unflinching lack of sentimentality. Wilt's problems are compounded by nature in the shape of a rose bush, nostalgia, temporary infatuation with a foreign student and the hostility of medical services unwilling to attend to his most urgent needs. But it is only when Wilt becomes the unintentional participant in a terrorist siege that he is forced to find an answer to the problems of power, which have corrupted greater men than he. With a mental ingenuity born of his innate cowardice, Wilt fights for those liberal values which are threatened both by international terrorism and by the sophisticated methods of police anti- terrorist agents. In the confusion that follows, Wilt resumes his dialogue with the unflagging Inspector Flint and is himself subjected to the indignity of a psycho- political profile. Bitingly funny and brilliantly written, THE WILT ALTERNATIVE exposes the farcical anomalies, which have become the social norms of our time.

Peregrine Roderick Clyde-Brown, a bumbling British public schoolboy, has a penchant for taking the most innocent commands literally. His adventures whisk him to a French castle, where he commits murder and mayhem. British humor is rarely captured as effectively as this. Fry accomplishes an incredible range of accents and distinctions of age, occupation and sex. If hearing an imitation of a man with a missing lower denture tickles you, then Vintage Stuff is right up your alley. "When Tom Sharpe turns his attention to a very minor public school…the result is predictably savage. Hoaxes, chases, car crashes, shootings, and general mayhem. Wicked, riotous humour.” —Daily Telegraph

Henry Wilt, tied to a daft job and a domineering wife, has just been passed over for promotion yet again. Ahead of him at the Polytechnic stretch years of trying to thump literature into the heads of plasterers, joiners, butchers and the like. And things are no better at home where his massive wife, Eva, is given to boundless and unpredictable fits of enthusiasm -for transcendental meditation, yoga or the trampoline. But if Wilt can do nothing about his job, he can do something about his wife, in imagination at least, and his fantasies grow daily more murderous and more concrete. After a peculiarly nasty experience at a party thrown by particularly nasty Americans, Wilt finds himself in several embarrassing positions: Eva stalks out in stratospheric dudgeon, and Wilt, under the inspiration of gin, puts one of his more vindictive fantasies into effect. But suspicions are instantly aroused and Wilt rapidly achieves an unenviable notoriety in the role of The Man Helping Police With Their Enquiries. Or is he exactly helping? Wilt's problem -although he's on the other side of the fence -is the same as Inspector Flint's: where is Eva Wilt? But Wilt begins to flourish in the heat of the investigation, and as the police stoke the flames of circumstantial evidence, Wilt deploys all his powers to show that the Law can't tell a Missing Person from a hole in the ground.

SUMMARY: In Tom Sharpe's fourth uproarious Wilt novel, the indefatigable Henry Wilt embarks on the voyage of a lifetime a cross-country trip through England, without map or compass, carrying little more than a backpack and the boots on his feet. A week later sees him drunk and unconscious in the back of an arsonist's pickup truck. His trip goes even further downhill from there until he revives in the hospital, unable to figure out how he could possibly stand accused of arson, assassination and robbery. Meanwhile, Eva has taken the quads to visit Uncle Wally and Aunt Joan in Tennessee. With the four girls leaving their customary trail of insanity and destruction wherever they go, not to mention a mob of embittered drug enforcement agents, Eva's journey has also spiralled out of control. Bitingly funny,Wilt in Nowherepits Wilt against the intricacies of police persecution and the underbelly of Britain's medical facilities, brilliantly exposing the farcical realities of small-town England and America.

Wilt is still teaching at the Fenland Tech, attempting to drill English into plasterers, dozing through tedious committee meetings and occasionally getting mildly plastered in 'The Pig in a Poke' with one of his few bearable colleagues. But the even tenor of his days is rudely interrupted when the shadow of drug dealing flickers across the Tech. Suddenly Wilt becomes the target of suspicion. His colleagues believe him to be responsible for triggering a departmental inquiry, and his old adversary Inspector Flint, knowing that he's guilty of something, sees a chance to settle a number of scores. What his wife thinks is... well, what all wives think. But what none of them have reckoned with is Wilt's talent for making new enemies. What starts with an accusation of voyeurism in the staff lavatory (of the wrong gender to boot) leads, more or less directly, to a massive confrontation at a nearby US airbase with the forces of law and order on both sides and Wilt in his usual place- in the middle.