Ted Wallace is an old, sour, womanising, cantankerous, whisky-sodden beast of a failed poet and drama critic, but he has his faults too.

So begins a year-long process of torment and hopelessness, which will destroy his very identity, until almost nothing remains of him but this unquenchable desire for revenge. 'Whatever Stephen Fry does, he has it - that rare, unlearnable quality.

Michael Young is a brilliant young history student whose life is changed when he meets Leo Zuckerman, an ageing physicist with a theory that can change worlds.

Adrian Healey is magnificently unprepared for the long littleness of life; unprepared for more murders and wholly unprepared for the truth. Stephen Fry's breathtakingly outrageous debut novel, by turns eccentric, shocking, brilliantly comic and achingly romantic.

A memoir that tells how, sent to a boarding school 200 miles from home at the age of seven, the author survived beatings, misery, love, ecstasy, carnal violation, expulsion, imprisonment, criminal conviction, probation and catastrophe to emerge, at eighteen, ready to try and face the world in which he had always felt a stranger.