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When you're in bed alone and the phone rings at 2.15 a.m., you know that something is wrong. Only someone bad would ring at that hour. Or someone good with bad news, which would probably be worse. The answering machine kicks in with your very own Blast From the Past. In the early 80s, Polly was a seventeen-year-old ideological peace protestor and Jack was a U.S. Army captain stationed at England's Greenham Common and they had a secret and very unlikely affair. No two people could have had more to argue about, save that they couldn't live without each other, yet one day Jack came to the conclusion that he loved soldiering more than Polly and sacrificed their love to be a career army man. Now, sixteen years later, Polly is a lonely thirty-something social services employee and Jack is a four-star general who has returned to Britain to find her, his only true love. With only one night to resolve their differences, and a knife-wielding stalker lurking in the shadows, for everyone concerned this will be a night like no other. Cover photograph by Bruce Ayres. -
When you're in bed alone and the phone rings at 2.15 a.m., you know that something is wrong. Only someone bad would ring at that hour. Or someone good with bad news, which would probably be worse. The answering machine kicks in with your very own Blast From the Past. In the early 80s, Polly was a seventeen-year-old ideological peace protestor and Jack was a U.S. Army captain stationed at England's Greenham Common and they had a secret and very unlikely affair. No two people could have had more to argue about, save that they couldn't live without each other, yet one day Jack came to the conclusion that he loved soldiering more than Polly and sacrificed their love to be a career army man. Now, sixteen years later, Polly is a lonely thirty-something social services employee and Jack is a four-star general who has returned to Britain to find her, his only true love. With only one night to resolve their differences, and a knife-wielding stalker lurking in the shadows, for everyone concerned this will be a night like no other. Cover photograph by Bruce Ayres. -
Blind Faith: Ben Elton
$9.00Here is Ben Elton's dark vision of a post-apocalyptic society - where religious intolerance combines with a confessional, sex-obsessed, egocentric culture to create a world where nakedness is modesty and everyone knows everything about everybody. A world where every moment of intimacy is streamed onto a community website and what a person truly feels or believes is protected under law, while what is rational, even provable, is condemned as heresy...A world where to question ignorance and intolerance is to commit a crime against faith. Published in 2007 and with shades of Orwell's 1984 , it would seem that society has already arrived at this point. -
Chart Throb: Ben Elton
$6.00Chart Throb - the ultimate pop quest! Ninety five thousand hopefuls...three judges...one winner. And that's Calvin Simms, the genius behind the show. He always wins because he writes the rules. But this year, as he sits in judgement on the Mingers, Clingers and Blingers who've been pre-selected in his careful 'search for a star', he's got no idea that the rules are changing. The 'real' is about to be put back in reality television and Calvin and his fellow judges are about to become EX-factors. Ben Elton successfully takes the mickey out of another televisual fad - the modern television talent show. -
Dead Famous: Ben Elton
$6.00One house, ten contestants, thirty cameras, forty microphones. Yet again the public gorges its voyeuristic appetite as another group of unknown and unremarkable people submit themselves to the brutal exposure of the televised reality soap opera, House Arrest. Everyone knows the rules: total strangers are forced to live together while the rest of the country watches them do it, Who will crack first? Who will have sex with who? Who will the public love and who will they hate? All the usual questions. And then suddenly, there are some new ones. A murder. No evidence. How was it done under the constant watchful eyes of the cameras and the nation? And why? And...who will be next... A killer read - literally - from Ben Elton. Cover art by Tony Stone. -
Dead Famous: Ben Elton
$6.00One house, ten contestants, thirty cameras, forty microphones. Yet again the public gorges its voyeuristic appetite as another group of unknown and unremarkable people submit themselves to the brutal exposure of the televised reality soap opera, House Arrest. Everyone knows the rules: total strangers are forced to live together while the rest of the country watches them do it. Who will crack first? Who will have sex with who? Who will the public love and who will they hate? All the usual questions. And then suddenly, there are some new ones. A murder. No evidence. How was it done under the constant watchful eyes of the cameras and the nation? And why? And...who will be next... A killer read - literally - from Ben Elton. Cover art by Tony Stone. -
Gridlock: Ben Elton
$8.00Gridlock is when a city dies - killed in the name of freedom, killed in the name of oil and steel, choked on carbon monoxide and strangled with a pair of fluffy dice. How does it come to this? How does the ultimate freedom machine end up paralysing us all? How did we end up driving to our own funeral, on someone else's gravy train? Deborah and Geoffrey know, but they have transport problems of their own, and anyway, whoever it was that murdered the city can just as easily murder them. And Ben Elton knows, too. Set in a dystopian future with unlikely heroes and heroines who know what's going on - but can they stop the murder of their city before the killer can get them? -
Gridlock: Ben Elton
$12.00The world is driving itself to its own funeral. The car, so long the symbol of freedom and liberation, has become society's ball and chain. In environmental terms it wreaks more destruction than decent-sized wars and in return it carries us around our cities rather more slowly than a bicycle. How did it get to this? Everyone wants to unblock the jams - or perhaps they don't. Everyone wants cleaner, more efficient engines - maybe. We all long for the day that filthy, poisonous expensive oil will no longer be the blood in the veins of our way of life. Isn't that the bottom line? It depends on what we are prepared to lose: like, the wasted hours of gnawing the steering wheel and just wishing everyone else on earth would get out of the sodding way; the billions of tons of pollution; the endless death and destruction; the wholesale ruin of our environment. But there are those who would lose something much more important: Money - and power...Cover art by David Scutt. -
High Society: Ben Elton
$6.00The War on drugs has been lost. The simple fact is that the whole world is rapidly becoming one vast criminal network. From pop stars and royal princes to crack whores and street kids, from the Groucho Club toilets to the poppy fields of Afghanistan, we are all partners in crime. This is the story our world today - told in this collection of interconnected stories that takes the reader on a hilarious, heart breaking and terrifying journey through the kaleidoscope world that the law has created and from which the law offers no protection.
