larger image

PR contact info.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ISBN: 9781842430286
Price: £9.99
Casing: Paperback
Format: B (198 x 129mm)
Extent: 416pp
Rights: UK
Pub. Date: April 2001

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

larger image


Tom Robbins has been called "a vital natural resource" by The Portland Oregonian, "one of the wildest and most entertaining novelists in the world" by the FT, and "the most dangerous writer in the world today" by Fernanda Pivano of Italy's Corriere della Sera. A Southerner by birth, Robbins has lived in and around Seattle since 1962. He is the author of Villa Incognito, Still Life With Woodpecker, Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates, Even Cowgirls get the Blues and Jitterbug Perfume.
Find out more

ABOUT THE BOOK

this title has been replaced by a new edition >>

Switters is a contradiction for all seasons: an anarchist who works for the government, a pacifist who carries a gun, a vegetarian who sops up ham gravy. Yet there is nothing limp about Switters. He doesn't merely pack a pistol. He is a pistol. As we follow Switters across four continents Robbins explores, challenges and celebrates virtually every major aspect of our mercurial era.

As many readers well know, to describe a Tom Robbins plot does not begin to describe a Tom Robbins novel. The internationally acclaimed best-selling author is as opposed to story summations as J.D.Salinger, but it is revealing perhaps to learn what he claims to have influenced his writing of Fierce Invalids:

"This book was inspired by an entry from Bruce Chatwin's journal, by a CIA agent met in Southeast Asia, by the mystery surrounding the lost prophecy of the Virgin of Fatima, by the increasing evidence that the interplay of opposites is the engine that runs the universe, and by embroidered memories of old Terry and the Pirates comic books."

RELATED FEATURES

• The First Chapter

CRITICAL ACCLAIM

'one of the wildest and most entertaining novelists in the world'
- The Financial Times

'a thoroughly postmodern guru'
- Independent On Sunday [read the full review]

'Tom Robbins has a grasp on things that dazzles the brain and he's also a world-class storyteller '
- Thomas Pynchon

'In his seventh, and perhaps most complex novel to date, Robbins shines as brilliantly as he has in the past...superb current social commentary'
- The New York Post