In the 1890s, “Lower California” is a land adrift, peopled by Indians and half-breeds, and now by the French as well. The Indians are indifferent to Western notions of time and industry. The French, on the other hand, are sufficiently meticulous to import 2,348 pieces of cast iron to the desolate mining town of Santa Sofia, there to be assembled into a church under the supervision of a disciple of the renowned Gustave Eiffel. This wildly impractical venture is the starting premise for this new novel by the author of The Five Gates of Hell, a writer the Washington Post has called “a virtuoso of the hallucinatory.” As Theophile Valence attempts to re-create Paris in an outpost of hell—and his wife, Suzanne, arouses the doomed passions of an American prospector and a Mexican army officer—Air and Fire fuses adventure and romance into a magnificent tale of conflicting passions and cultures.    “Absorbing . . . More than anything else, it is the prose oin which Thomson evokes [his character’s] mental life that, with the concentration of a magnifying glass, kindles this novel’s fire.”—The New Yorker

Air and Fire

Literature & Fiction

THOMSON, Rupert

Contemporary

Alfred.A. Knopf

Death of a Murderer

Rupert Thomson—“a true master,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle—now gives us his most powerful work yet: the story of a woman who, even after her death, inflames an entire nation, and of the man who comes under her spell. Having spent decades in prison for crimes gruesomely familiar to everyone in England, this murderer has finally died of natural causes but is no less notorious in death than she was in life. Billy Tyler, a career policeman, has been assigned the task of guarding her body—to make sure, he’s told, that nothing happens. But alone on a graveyard shift his wife begged him not to accept, Billy has occasion to contemplate the various turns his life has taken, his complicated thoughts about violence in himself and society, the unease that distances him from marital disappointment and a damaged daughter, and, finally, why it is that this reviled murderer, in the eerie silence of the hospital morgue, seems to speak to him directly and know him more fully than anyone else. In this dark night of the soul, his own problems and anxieties gradually acquire a new and unexpected significance, giving rise to questions that should haunt us all: Whom do we love, and why? How do we protect our children? And what separates us from those we call monsters? A gripping revelation of crime, of punishment—and of what we desperately seek to hide from ourselves.

KNOPF

After decades in prison for crimes gruesomely familiar to everyone in England, a murderer has finally died of natural causes, no less notorious in death than she was in life. Billy Tyler, a career policeman, has been assigned the task of guarding her body in the hospital morgue. But alone on a graveyard shift his wife begged him not accept, Billy has occasion to contemplate the various turns his life has taken and to discover why it is that on this dark night of the soul the reviled murderer seems to speak to him directly. Death of a Murderer is a gripping novel of crime, punishment, fear, and temptation.

Death of a Murderer (Vintage International)

United States

Vintage

Soft!

The waitress Glade Spencer--white-blond hair, perfect skin, just twenty-two years old--drifts innocent and waiflike through life, thus far avoiding harm to herself . . . Barker Dodds, hoping to shed his hard-man reputation, has fled his native Plymouth for a fresh start in London. There, meanwhile, in an act of desperate inspiration, an ambitious young executive faced with a saturated market contrives a revolutionary strategy for introducing a new beverage, Soft!, that has all the potential of becoming the soft drink of the twenty-first century. Once this highly confidential strategy develops unforeseen complications, Barker is paid a visit by a friend from the old life, and soon is presented with an unthinkable dilemma. And the person with whom he now shares a destiny--unbeknownst to her--is Glade. Rupert Thomson, author of The Insult ("A psychological thriller that has just about everything" --Cleveland Plain Dealer), here explores the price of ambition, the difficulty of change or escape, and the needs that drive us or that we ourselves create; and in Soft! he again transforms the conventions of noir--whether contract-killing or romance or the classic double-cross--into fiction that is remarkably contemporary and strange.

British & Irish

The Book of Revelation

"He felt them begin to touch him. Sometimes their hands were tender, sometimes they were only curious, but there was no part of him, no curve or hollow, that they did not, in the end, explore." On a bright spring day in Amsterdam, a young man steps out of his studio to buy a pack of cigarettes. A dancer and choreographer, he would seem to have made the life of his choice: an international reputation; an exquisite French girlfriend, from whom he's been inseparable for seven years; careful plans for an interesting future, with no regrets lingering in his past. Moreover, he is charismatic and physically beautiful. Then, passing through a dark alley, he is accosted by three cloaked and hooded women -- fans, he briefly thinks -- who drug and then hold him their sexual prisoner. Their motivations remain to him as mysterious as the story of his abduction seems unbelievable, even laughable, to those in whom he later confides his plight and shame. Those eighteen days of bizarre captivity, and the subsequent years of his life, make The Book of Revelation a wildly compelling and deeply disturbing account of the most forbidding aspects of the human psyche.

Former bouncer Barker Dodds wants nothing more than to flee his violent past in his native Plymouth for an uncertain new existence as a barber in London's colorful East End. Waif-like Glade Spencer drifts through life as a waitress at a fashionable Soho restaurant, a devoted daughter to her estranged, caravan-dwelling father, and a long-distance girlfriend to an unpredictable American lawyer. And ambitious soft drink branch manager Jimmy Lyle is eager to please his new American boss with a revolutionary marketing strategy for Soft!, one that promises to make the new orange-colored beverage a soda sensation for the twenty-first century. It is under that effervescent orange glow that these three disparate souls intersect, as each learns "there is nothing soft about the soft drink industry." When unsuspecting "Soft! ambassador" Glade begins to unravel from her subconscious obsession with a product she's never tried, Jimmy's top-secret campaign threatens to spill into the daily papers, and Barker once again finds himself employed as a thug-for-hire. At turns harrowing and darkly humorous, Soft! is a magnificently surreal story, one that New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani calls "Rupert Thomson's most powerful novel yet."

Literary

Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

In an edgy psychological thriller that is as mesmerizing as it is profound, Rupert Thomson fearlessly delves into the darkest realm of the human spirit to reveal the sinister connection between sexuality and power. Stepping out of his Amsterdam studio one April afternoon to buy cigarettes for his girlfriend, a dashing 29-year old Englishman reflects on their wonderful seven-year relationship, and his stellar career as an internationally acclaimed dancer and choreographer. But the nameless protagonist's destiny takes an unthinkably horrifying turn when a trio of mysterious cloaked and hooded women kidnap him, chain him to the floor of a stark white room to keep as their sexual prisoner, and subjected him to eighteen days of humiliation, mutilation, and rape. Then, after a bizarrely public performance, he is released, only to be held captive in the purgatory of his own guilt and torment: The realization that no one will believe his strange story. Coolly revelatory, meticulously crafted, The Book of Revelationis Rupert Thomson at his imaginative best.

The Book of Revelation: A Novel

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

On Moon Beach, a seaside sunbelt, the elderly who flock there are preyed upon by the funeral industry that controls the region, an industry headed by the omnipotent and elegant Neville Creed

Five Gates Of Hell

World Literature

Random House Canada

The Five Gates of Hell

Random House Value Publishing

The Insult

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by THOMSON, Rupert. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by THOMSON, Rupert

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by THOMSON, Rupert. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Air and Fire

Death of a Murderer

Death of a Murderer (Vintage International)

Soft!

The Book of Revelation

Soft!

The Book of Revelation: A Novel

Five Gates Of Hell

The Five Gates of Hell

The Insult