Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts on 3 February 2011.
I just love this man’s writing. The 17-year old, razor happy gang leader, Pinkie, is one of fiction’s great characters, truly nasty. Despite the dated period, the underlying message is the same today as it ever was. It is perhaps Greene’s greatest book.
Pinkie Brown, a neurotic teenage gangster wielding a razor blade and a bottle of sulfuric acid, commits a brutal murder - but it does not go unnoticed. Rose, a naive young waitress at a rundown cafe, has the unwitting power to destroy his crucial alibi, and Ida Arnold, a woman bursting with easy certainties about what is right and wrong, has made it her mission to bring about justice and redemption.
Set among the seaside amusements and dilapidated boarding houses of Brighton's pre-war underworld, Brighton Rock by Graham Greene is both a gritty thriller and a study of a soul in torment. A classic of modern literature, it maps out the strange border between piety and savagery.
This beautiful Macmillan Collector's Library edition of Brighton Rock features an introduction by the poet, biographer and editor, Professor Richard Greene.
Designed to appeal to the book lover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.
Graham Greene was born in 1904. He was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour. Graham Greene died in April 1991. Among the many people who paid tribute to him on his death was Kingsley Amis: 'He will be missed all over the world. Until today, he was our greatest living novelist.'
