Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance - Tapa dura

"That the [stories] evoke responses ranging from surprise and laughter to shock and horror is testament to the skill of a first-rate storyteller." --"The Gazette" (Montreal) "Kneale . . . has a gift for spinning whole cloth when it comes to settings, [without] a loose thread in the lot." --"The Globe and Mail" "Kneale . . . has produced a series of compelling narrative jaunts which have a kind of licensed freedom of thought." --"The Observer "(UK) Praise for "English Passengers," winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year 2000, and shortlisted for the Booker Prize: "English Passengers is what fiction ought to be: ambitious, narrative-driven, with a story and a quest we don't mind going on. On page after page I found myself laughing or nodding or simply envious. --Nicholas Shakespeare, author of Bruce Chatwin: A Biography "A robust intellectual entertainment: a comic sea-adventure, survival tale and quest for the Garden of Eden all rolled into one." --"The Globe and Mail" "Every page fizzes with linguistic invention, and the interweaving of high comedy with dramatic terror is expertly handled." --"The Guardian" "Sometimes a book comes along so full of wit and charm that it makes you glad you learned to read." --"Houston Chronicle"

In his gripping new work, Matthew Kneale takes us on a journey around today's uncertain world. From England to South America, China to the Middle East, the United States to Africa, Kneale applies his gifts as a master storyteller, vividly capturing the lives of ordinary people as they struggle to live, and to do the right thing, often managing neither. From a smugly well-intentioned English family who leave their tour group in China to travel alone, and slowly becoming complicit in its violence, to a ploddingly respectable London lawyer who chances upon a stash of cocaine and discovers it offers the wealth and status he hungers for, to a self-doubting suicide bomber, Matthew Kneale transports readers across frontiers in an instant. He sets the foreign and the familiar side by side, and in doing so challenges our understanding of both. By turns painful, moving and wickedly funny, Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance gains momentum until the world seems to be revealed to us in a new way. This is a groundbreaking work by a master of the uncertainties of our time.