Europa
The night before his daughter's eighteenth birthday, Jerry Marlow finds himself one of a coachload o...
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The night before his daughter's eighteenth birthday, Jerry Marlow finds himself one of a coachload of delegates bound for the European Parliament in Strasbourg. Is Jerry on the trip to support a petition to keep the job he doesn't really want, or because his ex-mistress - the one he left his wife for - is of the party? Or because he is one of six males among a score of nubile students on what the organizer of the petition has dubbed the shag-wagon?Compulsive lover, loser and liar, Jerry is as savagely misanthropic as he is totteringly insecure. Yet on the predicament of this devious, dangerous, lapsed-classicist rake, Tim Parks fashions a novel that leaves the reader with the brain spinning and the palms clammy - and with the craven hope that the arrowheads are aimed at somebody else. It isn't Jerry's chaotic love life that cranks up the nail-biting tension, but the implacable sense that there is some separate catastrophe lurking in the wings. And there is.
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