A New History of Torments is a work of extraordinary imaginative scope by a writer at the height of his powers-a novel in which allegory and action, illusion and disillusion, passion and suspense blend into a complex and fascinating plot that could have been devised by a cunning fate ... or by a master novelist. The story begins with a wealthy South American ranch owner, Jorge Rojas Jiminez, and the curse he brings on his land when he leaves his wife of two decades for a young and greedy mistress. As drought withers the crops, vampire bats ravage the herds, and the earth dies, Rojas' two...

Set in the swinging London of the 1960s, Crump's Terms evokes that time of the exploding popular culture through the life of its remarkable hero. An English teacher at a London Secondary Modern school, Crump presides over a class of adolescents. In the course of his working day, his narrative is presented as a continuous stream of memories, associations and obsessive literary quotations that cut into the present with cinematic deftness. The nouvelle vague cinema, which was important in the 1960s, the burgeoning popular culture and Pop Art, the whole cultural environment of the time is the...