The final volume in a trilogy beginning with Umbrella and followed by Shark , Phone tells the story of two men: Zack Busner and Jonathan De'Ath. Busner is a psychiatrist who has made his name through his unorthodox treatment of psychological damage, such as administering LSD to World War II PTSD-sufferers. But now Busner's own mind is fraying: Alzheimer's is shredding his memory and his newest possession is a shiny smartphone given to him by his autistic grandson Ben. Meanwhile, Jonathan De'Ath, aka "the Butcher," is an MI6 man who remains a mystery even to those closest to him. Perhaps there is only one person who thinks of him with tenderness, a man he keeps top secret, encrypted in the databanks of his steely mind: Colonel Gawain Thomas, husband, father, highly trained tank commander, and Jonathan De'Ath's long-time lover. As Busner's mind totters and Jonathan and Gawain's affair teeters, they come to face the interconnectedness of all lives, online and off, while an irritating phone continues to ring. . . . ring. . . . ring. . . .

May 4th, 1970. A week earlier President Nixon has ordered American ground forces into Cambodia to pursue the Vietcong. By the end of the day four students will be shot dead by the National Guards in the grounds of Kent State University. On the other side of the Atlantic, it's a brilliant sunny morning after an April of heavy rain, and at the "Concept House" therapeutic community he has set up in the London suburb of Willesden, maverick psychiatrist Dr Zack Busner has been tricked into joining a decidedly ill advised LSD trip with several of its disturbed residents. Five years later, sitting in a nearby cinema watching Steven Spielberg's Jaws , Busner realizes the true nature of the events that transpired on that dread-soaked day, when a survivor of the worst disaster in the US Navy's history - the sinking of the USS Indianapolis - came face-to-face with the British Royal Air Force observer on the Enola Gay's mission to bomb Hiroshima. Set a year before the action of his Booker-shortlisted Umbrella , Will Self's new novel Shark continues its exploration of the complex relationship between human psychopathology and human technological progress.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Grey Area demonstrates Will Self's razor-sharp wit in nine new stories that delve into the modern psyche with unsettling and darkly satiric results. "Inclusion(R)" tells the story of a doctor who is illegally testing a new antidepressant made from bee excrement. "A Short History of the English Novel" brings us face to face with a pompous publisher who is greeted at every turn by countless rejected authors. In "The End of the Relationship" a woman who has been left by her boyfriend provokes -- "like some emotional Typhoid Mary" -- that same reaction among all the couples she goes to for comfort. The narrator of "Between the Conceits" declares without hesitation that London is controlled by only eight individuals, and, thankfully, he is one of them.

"A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella."--James Joyce, Ulysses 1918 Audrey Death--feminist, socialist and munitions worker at Woolwich Arsenal--falls ill with encephalitis lethargica as the epidemic rages across Europe, killing a third of its victims and condemning a further third to living death. 1971 Under the curious eyes of psychiatrist Dr. Zack Busner, assumed mental patient Audrey Death lies supine in bed above a spring grotto that she has made every one of the forty-nine years she has resided in Friern Mental Hospital. 2010 Now retired, Dr. Busner travels waywardly across North London in search of the truth about that tumultuous summer when he awoke the post-encephalitic patients under his care using a new and powerful drug. Weaving together a dense tapestry of consciousness and lived life across an entire century, in his latest and most ambitious novel, Will Self takes up the challenge of Modernism and reveals how it--and it alone--can unravel new and unsettling truths about our world and how it came to be.

When Tom Brodzinksi tries to give up smoking, he inadvertently sets off a chain of events that threaten to upset the tenuous balance of peace in a not-too-distant land. When he flips the butt of his final cigarette off the balcony of his vacation apart-ment, it lands on elderly Reggie Lincoln, lounging on the balcony below. Lincoln suf-fers a burn, and the local authorities charge Tom with assault―in a country with draconian anti-smoking laws, a cigarette is a weapon of offense. For reparation, Tom must leave his family behind and wander through the arid center of the country's deserted territory. Joining Tom on his journey is Brian Prentice, a mysteriously sin-ister presence, who has his own sins to make up for. Inevitably, the two men en-counter violence, forcing them to come together despite their seething mistrust. Refusing facile moral certitudes, The Butt is set in a distorted world, a country that is part Australia, part Iraq, and part the heart of a distinctively modern darkness.

One of the most remarkably inventive voices of his generation, author Will Self delivers a stunning work of fiction. In Walking to Hollywood , a British writer named Will Self goes on a quest through L.A. freeways and eroding English cliffs, skewering celebrity as he attempts to solve a crime: who killed the movies. When Will reconnects with his childhood friend, the world suddenly seems disproportionate. Sherman Oaks--scarcely three feet tall at forty-five--and his ironically-sized sculptures--replicas of his body varying from the gargantuan to the miniscule--spark in Will a flurry of obsessive-compulsive thoughts and a nagging desire to experience the world by foot. Ignoring his therapist and nemesis Zack Busner, Self travels to Hollywood on a mission to discover who--or what--killed the movies. Convinced that everyone from his agent, friends, and bums on the street are portrayed by famous actors, Self goes undercover into the dangerous world of celebrity culture. He circumambulates the metropolitan area in hallucinating and wild episodes, eventually arriving on the English cliffs of East Yorkshire where he comes face to face with one of Jonathan Swift's immortal Struldbruggs.

In this collection of four linked stories, newly reissued by Grove, Will Self takes aim at the disease and decay that target the largest of human organs: the liver. Set in locales as toxic as a London drinking club and mundane as a clinic in an orderly Swiss city, the stories distill the hard lives of their subjects, whether alcoholic, drug addict, or cancer patient. In "Foie Humaine," set at the Plantation Club, it's always a Tuesday afternoon in midwinter, and the shivering denizens of this dusty realm spend their days observing its proprietor as he force-feeds the barman vodka-spiked beer. Joyce Beddoes, protagonist of "Leberknödel," has terminal liver cancer and is on her way to be euthanized in Zurich when, miraculously, her disease goes into remission. In "Prometheus," a young copywriter at London's most cutting-edge ad agency has his liver nibbled by a griffon thrice daily, but he's always in the pink the following morning and ready to make that killer pitch. If blood and bile flow through liverish London, the two arteries meet in "Birdy Num Num," where career junky Billy Chobham performs little services for the customers who gather to wait for the Man, while in his blood a virus pullulates. A moving portrayal of egos, appetites, and addictions, Liver is an extraordinary achievement from one of the most talented minds working today.