Heliopolis

"Heliopolis" by James Scudamore, published by Harvill Secker. James Scudamore’s comic, violent and poignant rags-to-riches tale is the story of a man whose appetites risk taking him to the brink of madness.Leo has returned to the vast city of São Paulo, where he was born in a shantytown. He is now on the opposite side of its social divide. Aged 27, he works for a vacuous ‘communications company’, marketing unwanted, unaffordable products aimed at the very underclass into which he was born. He has developed an obsessive, adulterous love for his adoptive sister, whose husband is his only friend. And he has a hunger that can never be satisfied. Welcome to Leo’s world.''Scudamore has the superb novelist’s gift for giving vivid, sympathetic life to even second-string characters, as well as his main ones; and he also has the extraordinary power of summoning an entire brooding, smoggy city to life. Most of all, though, he has the ability to take on the heaviest of themes with the lightest and most compelling of touches, and leave you with an appetite for more.'' - The Daily Telegraph UKJames Scudamore is the author of the novels English Monsters, Wreaking, Heliopolis, and The Amnesia Clinic. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award and been nominated for the Costa First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Man Booker Prize. Book details: 278 pages, published 2009. Order now on BookShops.in with fast, reliable delivery across India.