David Pryce-Jones

Set against the backdrop of the Millenium celebrations and Britain's increasingly compromised role in America's 'war against terrorism', The Closed Circle lifts the lid on an era in which politics and presentation, ideology and the media have become virtually indistinguishable. Darkly comic, hugely engaging, and compulsively readable, it is the much-anticipated follow-up to Jonathan Coe's bestselling novel The Rotters' Club, and reintroduces us to the characters first encountered in that book. But whereas The Rotters' Club was a novel of innocence, The Closed Circle is its opposite: a novel of experience.

Merritt Fowler is a natural caretaker. Most of her life she has cared for her beautiful, erratic younger sister, Laura; her self-sacrificing physician husband, Pom; and her lovely, fragile sixteen-year-old daughter, Glynn. Now, in this strange summer of unnaturally warm weather and growing pressures, she is caring too for her husband's destructive, controlling mother, who is ill with advanced Alzheimer's disease. Exhausted and confused, Merritt no longer knows quite who she is or what is important to her. She only knows that something deep inside is about to crack. A fierce family quarrel sends Glynn running west from Atlanta to seek sanctuary with her aunt Laura, a fine actress whose promising Hollywood career is in decline. Merritt goes after her daughter - against Pom's wishes and in the face of his anger - and she impulsively decides to stay in California to see if the widening fissures between mother, sister, and daughter can be healed. After a head-on collision with Laura's shallow, seductive Hollywood world and her betraying film director lover, the three women end up in Laura's red Mustang convertible, barreling up the wild coast from the Palm Springs Desert to the Santa Cruz Mountains outside San Francisco - earthquake country. In a borrowed lodge among the great redwoods, they finally stop to confront one another and their own demons.

The sudden and almost bloodless demise of the Soviet Union - and with it, communism - caught everyone by surprise, from the KGB and the Red Army to Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and the dissidents at home and in the satellite states. In the first full-scale account of this mysterious transformation, historian and journalist David Pryce-Jones is able to provide answers to the crucial questions: Why did Gorbachev not shoot his way out of the crisis in classic Soviet style, as former leaders had done in Hungary and Czechoslovakia? How did an unlikely alliance of nationalist actors, idealistic poets, and political priests unseat the ruling despots of Warsaw, Bucharest, East Berlin, and Prague? What role did the West really play in all this? And what do these remarkable events presage for Russia's future? The result is a vivid account of the Soviet empire's fall, as experienced from the inside - and at the top. Uncompromising in its accuracy and keen in its insight, The Strange Death of the Soviet Empire is the definitive account of one of history's greatest anticlimaxes.

A satirical novel of one Englishman, a Mr. Edward Albert Tewler, from cradle to grave and his thoughts on religion, politics, education and sex.