A teenage sociopath rises to power in Britain's criminal underworld in this "brilliant and uncompromising" thriller (The New York Times). Seventeen-year-old Pinkie Brown, raised amid the casual violence and corruption in the dire prewar Brighton slums, has left his final judgment in the hands of God. On the streets, impelled by his own twisted moral doctrine, he leads a motley pack of gangsters whose sleazy little rackets have most recently erupted...

Haiti, under the rule of Papa Doc and his menacing paramilitary, the Tontons Macoute, has long been abandoned by tourists. Now it is home to corrupt capitalists, foreign ambassadors and their lonely wives-and a small group of enterprising strangers rocking into port on the Dutch cargo ship, Medea: a well-meaning pair of Americans claiming to bring vegetarianism to the natives; a former jungle fighter in World War II Burma and current confidence man;...

Querry, a world-famous architect, is the victim of an attack of indifference, no longer finding meaning in art or pleasure in life. Arriving anonymously at a Congo leper village, he is diagnosed as the mental equivalent of a 'burnt-out case', a leper who has gone through a stage of mutilation. However, as Querry loses himself in work for the lepers, his disease of mind slowly approaches a cure. Then the white community finds out who Querry is...

Maurice Bendrix, a writer in Clapham during the Blitz, develops an acquaintance with Sarah Miles, the bored, beautiful wife of a dull civil servant named Henry. Maurice claims it's to divine a character for his novel-in-progress. That's the first deception. What he really wants is Sarah, and what Sarah needs is a man with passion. So begins a series of reckless trysts doomed by Maurice's increasing romantic demands and Sarah's tortured sense of guilt....