"We are merely the stars' tennis balls, struck and --bandied/Which way please them." ----The Duchess of Malfi --by John Webster Everything about Stephen Fry's new novel, including the title, will be a surprise, perhaps even a shock. The only thing that can be guaranteed is that it will be his next earth-movingly funny bestseller. And we are still pretty confidently saying it will not be about earthworm migration patterns in East Devon. This is the story of Ned Maddenstone, a nice young man who is about to find out just what hell it is to be one of the stars' tennis balls. For Ned, 1978 seems a blissful year: handsome, popular, responsible and a fine cricketer, life is progressing smoothly for him, if not effortlessly. When he meets Portia Fendeman his personal jigsaw appears complete. What if her left-wing parents despise his Tory MP father? Doesn't that just make them star-crossed lovers? And surely, in the end, won't the Fendemans be won over by their happiness? But, of course, one person's happiness is another's jealous spite. And spite is about to change Ned's life forever. A promise made to a dying teacher and a vile trick played by fellow pupils rocket Ned from cricket captain to solitary confinement, from head boy to political prisoner. Twenty years later, Ned returns to London a very different man from the boy seized outside a Knightsbridge language college. A man implacably focused on revenge. Revenge is a dish he plans to savour and serve to those who conspired against him, and to those who forgot him.

'Brilliantly clever . . . mercilessly funny.' - Kenneth Allsop, Daily Mail 'One of the most brilliantly written books since the war.' - Ian Fleming, Sunday Times ' A] clever and pitiless novel.' - Neil Ascherson, Observer ' An] extremely promising and funny first novel.' - New Yorker 'I laughed until I cried. Benedictus is a dazzling new wit and a blazing new talent.' - Patrick Dennis David Benedictus was only twenty-three when his shock-filled, highly controversial first novel was published in 1962. In The Fourth of June , Benedictus shows what it was like to have attended Eton College, one of England's most prestigious schools. Among its hallowed buildings, a boy is savagely beaten into paralysis by his House Captain, a bishop spends his evening spying on a chaplain's half-dressed daughter, and a housemaster is seduced by a desperate mother. Condemned by some reviewers as a farrago of sex, snobbery, and sadism, The Fourth of June nonetheless met with rave reviews from other critics, who proclaimed Benedictus one of the most promising new novelists of his generation, and went on to be a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. This new edition, the first in more than 30 years, includes an introduction by the author.

"As a boarding school student in the early 1960s, Patrick Modiano lived among the troubled teenage sons of wealthy but self-involved parents. In this mesmerizing novel, Modiano weaves together a series of exquisitely crafted stories about such jettisoned boys at the exclusive Valvert School on the outskirts of Paris: abandoned children of privilege, left to create new family ties among themselves. Misfits and heroes, sports champions and good-hearted chums, the boys of Valvert misbehave, run away, get expelled, and engage in various forms of delinquency and disappearance. They emerge into adulthood tragically damaged, still tethered to their adolescent selves, powerless to escape the central loneliness of their lives in an ever-darkening spiral of self-delusion and grim consequence"--Back cover.

Coney Island, 1939: On the eve of World War II, fifteen-year-old Harry Carzker spends his after-school hours on his bike, picking up betting slips from Coney Island carnival freaks for the local bookie and racing his imaginary sworn enemy, German Captain Ziegenbaum, whose ship menaces the coastline. His parents are in their own world: his father writes a serial novel for the local Yiddish newspaper by day and hangs out with other intellectuals at the Cafe Royal by night; his beautiful mother grows increasingly bitter, yearning for a glamorous life that is certain to be denied to the wife of a writer. As the lights of the Cyclone and Luna Park glow in the Coney Island night. Harry finds a surrogate family in the freaks and low-lifes. A premature victim of Welischmerz, "lovingly applied by loved ones, ignorant of its toxicity on the young", Harry ponders life, art, and philosophy with Aba, a Yiddish poet who boards with his family, yet he is unable to shake the dark foreboding of a disaster that finally materializes, changing his life utterly. Coney, soaked through with atmosphere and guided by an uncommon comic touch, captures the essence of a young man's coming of age in an extraordinary place and time. Depicting Coney Island in all its garish and gritty human spectacle. Amram Ducovny's dark and brilliant first novel has the stark intensity of a Weegee photograph, the heart of E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, and the soul of an Isaac Bashevis Singer novel.