J.G. Farrell – författare

In the Spring of 1857, with India on the brink of a violent and bloody mutiny, Krishnapur is a remote town on the vast North Indian plain. For the British there, life is orderly and genteel. Then the sepoys at the nearest military cantonment rise in revolt and the British community retreats with shock into the Residency. They prepare to fight for their lives with what weapons they can muster. As food and ammunition grow short, the Residency, its defences battered by shot and shell and eroded by the rains, becomes ever more vulnerable.

The Siege of Krishnapur is a modern classic of narrative excitement that also digs deep to explore some fundamental questions of civilisation and life.

''Suspense and subtlety, humour and horror, the near-neighbourliness of heroism and insanity: it is rare to find such divergent elements being controlled in one hand and being raced, as it were, in one yoke. But Farrell manages just this here: his imaginative insight and technical virtuosity combine to produce a novel of quite outstanding quality'' The Times

''The magnificient passages of action in The Siege of Krishnapur, its gallery of characters, its unashamedly detailed and fascinating dissertations on cholera, gunnery, phrenology, the prodigal inventiveness of its no doubt also well-documented scenes should satisfy the most exacting and voracious reader. For a novel to be witty is one thing, to tell a good story is another, to be serious is yet another, but to be all three is surely enough to make it a masterpiece'' John Spurling, New Statesman

NOW A MAJOR ITV DRAMA, THE SINGAPORE GRIP IS A MODERN CLASSIC FROM THE BOOKER-PRIZE WINNING J.G. FARRELL''Brilliant, richly absurd, melancholy'' Observer''Enjoyable on many different levels'' Sunday Times''One of the most outstanding novelists of his generation'' Spectator

Singapore, 1939: Walter Blackett, ruthless rubber merchant, is head of British Singapore''s oldest and most powerful firm. And his family''s prosperous world of tennis parties, cocktails and deferential servants seems unchanging. No one suspects it - but this world is poised on the edge of the abyss. This is the eve of the Fall of Singapore.

A love story and a war story, a tragicomic tale of a city under siege and a dying way of life, The Singapore Grip is a modern classic.

''A narrative of exceptional imagination and scope'' Newsweek''A fine piece of work, informative, funny tragic. One of those novels that present a whole world for the reader to inhabit'' Margaret Drabble''No writer has swallowed all of Singapore with the verve and wit of the late J.G. Farrell'' Time''His brilliant of style places him beside such masters of the modern novel as Patrick White and Saul Bellow'' Olivia Manning

A classic novel by a Booker Prize-winning authorTo the cool of the Simla hills comes a reluctant Dr McNab, with his wife and young niece. For Emily, romance is in the air. For the mysterious Mrs Forester, there is scandal brewing. And for the Bishop of Simla, rainclouds are not the only storms on the horizon.The Hill Station is the novel on which J.G. Farrell was working at the time of his tragically early accidental death. It demonstrates powerfully what a great loss to world literature this was.

WINNER OF THE 1970 BOOKER PRIZE

''And so at the Majestic everything returned to the way it had been before. The gleaming tiles became dulled. Sofas as sleek as prize cattle lost their glow.'' 1919, the Majestic Hotel in Kinalough, Ireland. Haunted war veteran Major Brendan Archer arrives to marry Angela Spencer, daughter of the house. But his fiancée is strangely altered, and her family''s fortunes have suffered a spectacular decline.

The hotel''s hundreds of rooms are disintegrating; its few remaining guests thrive on rumours and games of whist; herds of cats have taken over the Imperial Bar; bamboo shoots threaten the foundations; and piglets frolic in the squash court. And outside the order of the British Empire totters, as the violence of ''the troubles'' mounts.

''A work of genius'' Guardian