Byrne

"Byrne" is Anthony Burgess' final work: an epic verse novel. Michael Byrne is a minor modern composer with greater talent in bed than in the concert hall. A bigamist, a charmer and a thug, Byrne sells his talents as a composer and painter, ending up in Hitler's Third Reich. He moves opportunistically from country to country and from bed to bed, leaving a small tribe of children across the globe. He then vanishes and the story passes to his children, including twin sons, one a doubting priest, the other sick of an incapacitating disease, who move across the troubled face of contemporary Europe before encountering their father in one final apocalyptic confrontation. Brilliantly readable, enormously funny and full of passion and energy, it is also Anthony Burgess' last powerful statement of life and art.