Brighton Rock

Description

Pinkie Brown, a neurotic teenage gangster wielding a razor blade and a bottle of sulfuric acid, commits a brutal murder - but it does not go unnoticed. Rose, a naive young waitress at a rundown cafe, has the unwitting power to destroy his crucial alibi, and Ida Arnold, a woman bursting with easy certainties about what is right and wrong, has made it her mission to bring about justice and redemption. Set among the seaside amusements and dilapidated boarding houses of Brighton's pre-war underworld, Brighton Rock by Graham Greene is both a gritty thriller and a study of a soul in torment. A classic of modern literature, it maps out the strange border between piety and savagery. This beautiful Macmillan Collector's Library edition of Brighton Rock features an introduction by the poet, biographer and editor, Professor Richard Greene. Designed to appeal to the book lover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.

Graham Greene was born in Berkhamstead, England in 1904. The fourth of six children, he was educated at Berkhamstead school, where his father was headmaster, and then at Oxford University. He went on to work as a journalist for The Times where he met Vivien Dayrell-Browning, who was instrumental in his conversion to Catholicism. They married in 1927 and had two children. Greene's first novel, The Man Within (1929), was favourably received and kick-started a prolific writing career that included the novels Brighton Rock (1938) and Our Man in Havana (1958), short stories, biographies, plays and travel books, as well as film criticism. Considered one of the leading novelists of his generation, he was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967. Greene died in Switzerland in April 1991.