The Champion Book

Charles Pemberton has lived his whole life in the same small town: he went to the best local school he lived in one of the finest houses and his parents were effectively middle-class aristocracy. His quiet life of privileged contentment might well have continued undisturbed were it not for the arrival of Clark 'Large' Rossiter ...In this uncharismatic town Large is the biggest personality equally capable of magnetic charm and all-consuming wrath; he terrorizes the old guard and shakes up the established hierarchy in his relentless pursuit of money status and eventually revenge. Filled with Binding's typical perspicacity but leavened with a refreshing wit this is England: greedy flabby and vulnerable. Through the lives of Charles and Large Binding chronicles the vertiginous period from Thatcher to Blair - years all the more prescient for their similarity to the current boom and bust. "The Champion" is literary satire at its savage best. Praise for 'Anthem': 'This humane sweepingly ambitious tale is as close to the Great British Novel as you can get' - "Esquire". 'Engrossing ...a complicated but satisfying plot ...this novel is rich moving and real' - "Observer".'Binding sees England as at once a fiction and a necessity a sustaining ideal and a destroying angel an excuse and a means of redemption. The effect is by turns eerie exhilarating grotesque revolting and deeply moving ...[he] has set out to show what fiction can do when it stops worrying at its own importance' - "Independent on Sunday". Praise for 'Man Overboard': 'a consistently entertaining and resourceful novel' - "Guardian". Praise for 'A Perfect Execution': 'All human life is there in a mesmerizing world of its own' - "Guardian". 'A brilliant terrifying and haunting novel ...it has an almost Dickensian moral clarity ...a wholly impressive work. It combines all the packed action of a thriller with a vision remarkable for its breadth and for its humanity' - "Evening Standard". 'A compelling mixture of murder-mystery Greek tragedy and love story ...Set in the post-war period of travelling salesmen and Ruth Ellis look-alikes it asks the enormous eternal questions in language that is both lyrical and barbaric' - "Sunday Telegraph". Praise for 'Island Madness': 'The most stimulating and also the most exciting novel I read this year ...Part thriller part love story and wholly engrossing' - Antonia Fraser "Sunday Telegraph".'Rewarding subtlety and insight into the best and worst of human nature' - Jane Shilling "The Times".