Details about  Russian Hide & Seek: A Melodrama by Kingsley Amis/Britain Under Soviet Rule/USSR

'Russian Hide-and-Seek - A Melodrama'  by Kingsley AMIS. Published in hardback by Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Limited, please note that this book is a 1980 first edition book which is in excellent condition and not price-clipped at all. Please note that this Shipping Costs for UK buyers are £3.75p GBP by Royal Mail 2nd Class parcels (in addition to the sale price).

England fifty years after its takeover by the Soviet Union is the setting for Kingley Amis's savage but brilliant new tragi-comedy. In this land where official Rolls-Royces move among horse-drawn carts and where a bottle of whisky might costs £10,000, the Russians have abandoned all allegiance to Marxism and adopted a crude and decadent form of the ways of Tsarist Russia. For the natives, life is grey, but tolerable. For their Russian rulers, frantically pursuing pleasure, it is joyless and loveless.

In between his casual wooing of every pretty girl in sight and his bizarre couplings with the formidable wife of the Deputy Director of Security, a supposedly aristocratic young cavalry officer. Alexander Petrovsky becomes involved in a plot to topple the occupying government and return the country to the natives. Like 'Russian Hide-and-Seek' - the night-time recreation of a group of trigger-happy young officers - Alexander's eager flirtation with revolution goes frighteningly wrong, and he finds that he is the victim of a vicious and cynical conspiracy.

Kingsley Amis is at his most unmerciful in this black comedy of the future. A sharply drawn picture of despair and evil in a Russified Great Britain, Russian Hide-and-Seek is one of his most deeply felt and unsettling books to date.

'This 1980 first edition book runs to 240 pages. The book is in excellent condition and a fascinating read. Please note that the Shipping Costs for UK buyers are £3.75p GBP by Royal Mail 2nd Class parcels (in addition to the sale price).

The author: Kingsley AMIS  was born in South London in 1922 and was educated at the City of London School and at St. John's College, Oxford, of which he is an Honorary Fellow. He served in the army during World War II. Between 1949 and 1963 he taught at the University of Swansea, Princetown University and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He started his career as a poet and has continued to write in that medium ever since, but he is best known for his novels, beginning with Lucky Jim in 1954. Since then he has published two collections of verse, several critical and biographical works, a book of short stories and thirteen further novels, including the best-selling Jake's Thing. He was also the author of Colonel Sun, a James Bond adventure, under the pseudonym of Robert Markham. Recently he edited The New Oxford Book of Light Verse and The Faber Popular Reciter. Kingsley Amis is married to the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard and now lives in Hampstead. He has three children from a previous marriage. 

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