Lord Malquist and Mr Moon

Tom Stoppard’s first novel, originally published in 1966 soon after the premiere of his runaway success, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, is a dazzling fantasy set in modern London. The cast includes a penniless, dandified Malquist with a liveried coach, his Boswellian biographer, Moon, who frantically scribbles as a bomb ticks in his pocket, a couple of cowboys, a lion who’s banned from the Ritz, an Irishman on a donkey claiming to be the Risen Christ, and three irresistible women.

‘Superb fantasy, mad, sad and uproarious by turn.’ Oxford Times

‘A highly imaginative and theatrical black comedy, with a cunningly contrived denouement whose absurdity is chillingly logical.’ Glasgow Herald

‘A bizarre book, full of pastiche, with language continually tripping up its characters.’ Yorkshire Post

‘Lord Malquist and Mr Moon takes place in a dream-London where everything is seen through a haze of despair, and cowboys and a coach-and-pair and a pet lion wander with innumerable others through the plot, giving it a kind of child-like surrealism. It manages to be sad without being sentimental, and to give its fantasies a wit and exactness that make them fruitful and rewarding.’ Sunday Telegraph