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  • Published: 2 April 2012
  • ISBN: 9780099541431
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 672
  • RRP: $32.99

The Complete Enderby




Written between 1960 and 1984, and now collected in one volume, the four 'Enderby' novels are Burgess's finest comic achievement.

Enderby is a poet, social critic and Catholic. He may be found hiding in the lavatory where much of his best work is composed, or perhaps in Rome, brainwashed into respectability by a glamorous wife, aftershave and the dolce vita. Whether he is pursuing revenge and inspiration in Morocco, expounding on his notorious sex film on a TV chat show, or writing a hit musical based on the life and work of Shakespeare, Enderby emerges triumphant.

  • Published: 2 April 2012
  • ISBN: 9780099541431
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 672
  • RRP: $32.99

About the author

Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917. He served in the army from 1940 to 1954 before becoming a colonial education officer. It was while he held this post that doctors told him he would die, and he decided to try to live by writing.

He achieved a worldwide reputation as one of the leading novelists of his day, and one of the most versitile. His writings include criticism, scripts and translations, and a Broadway musical, and he composed three symphonies which have been publicly performed in the USA. His books have been published all over the world and include A Clockwork Orange, The Clockwork Testament, Inside Mr Enderby, Enderby's Dark Lady, Earthly Powers, Abba Abba and The End of the World News.

Anthony Burgess died in 1993.

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Praise for The Complete Enderby

The Enderby series are even finer comedies than those by Evelyn Waugh

Gore Vidal

Ferociously funny and wildly verbally inventive

The Times

Burgess is at his most inventive in these books, especially when he gives us the full text of Enderby's songs and sonnets (many of which are laughably bad). Poetry, Burgess seems to conclude, is rather like shitting: it's really about purging oneself of dead matter

Andrew Biswell, Observer

Burgess is the great postmodern storehouse of British writing-an important experimentalist; an encyclopaedic amasser, but also a maker of form; a playful comic, with a dark gloom

Malcolm Bradbury

No less an authority than Harold Bloom rates the Enderby books among the great comic fictions of our time. Certainly Anthony Burgess, that dizzying polymath and flamboyant novelist, never created a more engaging hero than this hapless poet... All in all, these four books, though diverse in tone and character, strikingly exhibit the narrative gusto and linguistic sprezzatura of Anthony Burgess at his best

Washington Post