With A City of Strangers, awardwinning novelist Robert Barnard, acclaimed for his quick wit and astute insight into the vagaries of class distinction and human foible, achieves a new level of mastery.He also creates one of his most memorable characters ever the dreadful Jack Phelan. Dirty, potbellied, vulgar, selfish, Jack is a man everyone loves to hate. And the rest of his family isnt much better. The wife is slatternly, the teenaged children flirt with petty crime and prostitution, even the baby is unpleasant. Only twelveyearold Michael Phelan seems to have escaped the family curse, and it may be just a question of time until he, too, sinks to the Phelan level.For years the infamous Phelans, known with equal horror to the Social Security office and the local school, have lived in slovenly squalor in their council house in the rundown Belfield Grove Estate in the northern English city of Sleate.The Phelans infamy has even penetrated the middleclass bastion of respectability, Wynton Lane, where six imposing Victorian stone houses stand in fearful isolation next to Belfield Grove.Wynton Lane and Belfield Grove have only their unfortunate proximity in common until the fateful day when the Phelans come to call. It seems that Jack has won big on the pools, and hes thinking of buying one of the six houses.Nothing so exciting has ever happened on Wynton Lane, and the homeowners hope it never will again. Until now barely nodding acquaintances the Wynton Lane residents call an...

Binding: Paperback;206 pages; Publisher: Pan Macmillan; Classification: FF; Weight: 446 g; Dimensions: 234 x 154 x 16

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