Comfort Zone

Description

A new novel from one of Britain's best-loved writer, Brian Aldiss OBE, set in and around his home-town of Oxford. Set in contemporary Oxford, this incisive novel charts the breakdown of a community. A new mosque is to be built - on the site of a derelict pub - and gradually, half-hidden prejudices begin to surface, and relationships between the residents start to sour. Drawing closely on current affairs, this novel investigates what it means to live in a post 7/7 world, where paranoia, prejudice and fear compete with tolerance and diversity.

Brian Aldiss, OBE, is a fiction and science fiction writer, poet, playwright, critic, memoirist and artist. He was born in Norfolk in 1925. After leaving the army, Aldiss worked as a bookseller, which provided the setting for his first book, The Brightfount Diaries (1955). His first published science fiction work was the story 'Criminal Record', which appeared in Science Fantasy in 1954. Since then he has written nearly 100 books and over 300 short stories, many of which are being reissued as part of The Brian Aldiss Collection. Several of Aldiss' books have been adapted for the cinema; his story 'Supertoys Last All Summer Long' was adapted and released as the film AI in 2001. Besides his own writing, Brian has edited numerous anthologies of science fiction and fantasy stories, as well as the magazine SF Horizons. Aldiss is a vice-president of the international H. G. Wells Society and in 2000 was given the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Aldiss was awarded the OBE for services to literature in 2005. He now lives in Oxford, the city in which his bookselling career began in 1947.

'For decades, Brian Aldiss has been among our most prolific and consistently stylish writers.' THE TELEGRAPH