’Like his subject, Lewis is an intellectual showman, a connoisseur of the arcane, a collector of titillating trivia . . . Fascinated with Burgess’ consummate fakery and repelled by his control-freakery, Lewis nonetheless succeeds in humanising this sacred monster.’ Christopher Silvester, Daily Express

The author of over sixty books – most famously A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess, Roger Lewis argues, was the writer as faker and prankster who lived, like an actor, by deception and illusion. Tracking his quarry from Manchester to Malaya to Malta to Monte Carlo, Lewis assesses Burgess’ struggles and grudges and in the process creates a deliriously kaleidoscopic modern classic about an antic disposition. Outrageously funny and irreverent, Anthony Burgess explores the divisions that characterised its subject and conjures a cast of drunks, nymphomaniacs, egotists, journalists and famous twentieth-century authors.