Dai Sijie's bestselling & much loved first novel, Balzac & the Little Chinese Seamstress, was a delightful fable. His second ...

Dai Sijie's bestselling & much loved first novel, Balzac & the Little Chinese Seamstress, was a delightful fable. His second ...

Mr Nasty charts the rise, fall & ultimate redemption of a wannabe player in the global narcotics business. From humble beginnings on the streets of London's East End, Cameron White rapidly ascended the drug ladder of London's club scene before notorious local criminals forced him to move to the US. There, he soon found himself aboard a cocaine-fuelled roller-coaster ride, transporting him from encounters with psychotic, crack-dealing Jamaicans in New York to luncheons with Hollywood's glitterati. The American adventure was to reach its inevitable conclusion in a drive-by shooting in the barrios of LA. Back in London, a dull nine-to-five existence did nothing to quell White's narco-inclinations. Cue a chemical vacation in Thailand & an effortless metamorphosis from recreational drug user to fully fledged smack addict in Berlin. White's eventual wake-up call came after he robbed some innocent tourists to feed his heroin habit. Stunned to realise how low he had sunk, he was determined to get clean & his gold-star efforts at rehabilitation were rewarded with an opportunity to start again in Australia. Faced with temptation once more, White's good intentions were to prove short-lived & he slid into the murky world of substance abuse in Sydney. But this time things were different & a gradual but life-defining epiphany rescued White from the edge. Mr Nasty is a thrilling yet cautionary tale of a decade lived within the narcotics underworld. Illuminating both the exciting & destructive sides of such an existence, it is ultimately a testament to how a strong will can sometimes overcome the lure of vice & break the chains of addiction. ...

THE BOOK: During the mid 1980's Howard Marks had forty three aliases, eighty nine phone lines & owned twenty five companies throughout the world. Whether bars, recording studios or offshore banks, all were money laundering vehicles serving the core activity: dope dealing. Marks began to deal small amounts of hashish while doing a postgraduate philosopy course at Oxford & soon he was moving much larger quantities into Europe & into America the equipment of touring British rock bands. The academic life began to lose its allure. At the height of his career he was smuggling consignments of up to fifty tons from Pakistan & Thailand to America & Canada & had contact with organisations as diverse as MI6, the CIA, the IRA & the Mafia. Numerous newspaper profiles, books & television documentaries have been devoted to Howard Mark's life. Touched with humour charm & candour, Mr Nice is his own extraordinary story. ...

THE BOOK: During the mid 1980's Howard Marks had forty three aliases, eighty nine phone lines & owned twenty five companies throughout the world. Whether bars, recording studios or offshore banks, all were money laundering vehicles serving the core activity: dope dealing. Marks began to deal small amounts of hashish while doing a postgraduate philosopy course at Oxford & soon he was moving much larger quantities into Europe & into America the equipment of touring British rock bands. The academic life began to lose its allure. At the height of his career he was smuggling consignments of up to fifty tons from Pakistan & Thailand to America & Canada & had contact with organisations as diverse as MI6, the CIA, the IRA & the Mafia. Numerous newspaper profiles, books & television documentaries have been devoted to Howard Mark's life. Touched with humour charm & candour, Mr Nice is his own extraordinary story. ...

THE BOOK: During the mid 1980's Howard Marks had forty three aliases, eighty nine phone lines & owned twenty five companies throughout the world. Whether bars, recording studios or offshore banks, all were money laundering vehicles serving the core activity: dope dealing. Marks began to deal small amounts of hashish while doing a postgraduate philosopy course at Oxford & soon he was moving much larger quantities into Europe & into America the equipment of touring British rock bands. The academic life began to lose its allure. At the height of his career he was smuggling consignments of up to fifty tons from Pakistan & Thailand to America & Canada & had contact with organisations as diverse as MI6, the CIA, the IRA & the Mafia. Numerous newspaper profiles, books & television documentaries have been devoted to Howard Mark's life. Touched with humour charm & candour, Mr Nice is his own extraordinary story. ...

After a chance encounter on a train the English teacher William Bradshaw starts a close friendship with the mildly sinister Arthur Norris. Norris is a man of contradictions; lavish but heavily in debt, excessively polite but sexually deviant. First published in 1933 Mr Norris Changes Trains piquantly evokes the atmosphere of Berlin during the rise of the Nazis. ...