Picador Classic Spring 2019 Catalogue

PICADOR CLASSIC

Less Than Zero Bret Easton Ellis A disturbing portrayal of privileged and immoral LA teenagers, Less Than Zero is a cult classic.

With an introduction by novelist Ottessa Moshfegh Eighteen-year-old college student Clay is back in his hometown of Los Angeles for Christmas break. Clay is three things: rich, bored and looking to get high. As he reacquaints himself with a familiarly limitless world of privilege, along with his best friend and his ex, his shocking, stunning and disturbing adventure is filled with non-stop drinking in glamorous nightclubs, drug-fuelled parties, and endless sexual encounters.

‘An extraordinarily accomplished first novel.’

New Yorker

Published in 1985, when Bret Easton Ellis was just twenty-one, Less Than Zero is a fierce coming-of-age story which quickly defined a genre. A cult classic beloved for its dogged portrayal of hedonistic youth and the morally depraved, this extraordinary and instantly famous novel is a landmark in modern fiction: an inventive, precocious and invigorating story of getting what you want when you want it.

‘The Catcher in the Rye for the MTV generation.’

USA Today ‘One of the most disturbing novels I’ve read in a long time. It possesses an unnerving air of documentary reality.’

Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

Bret Easton Ellis is the author of multiple novels including Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, Glamorama, Lunar Park and Imperial Bedrooms, which was a Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller, and a collection of stories, The Informers. His work has been translated into twentyseven languages and several have been made into films. He lives in Los Angeles.

10/01/2019 • £8.99 • 9781509870158 • Fiction • Paperback B Format • 208pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN

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The Sculptress Minette Walters A chilling and disturbing psychological thriller from the highly talented crime novelist Minette Walters.

This Picador Classic edition of Minette Walters’ The Sculptress features an introduction by Stephanie Merritt, journalist and author of While You Sleep.

‘It was a slaughterhouse, the most horrific scene I have ever witnessed . . . Olive Martin is a dangerous woman. I advise you to be extremely wary in your dealings with her.’

The facts of the case were simple: Olive Martin had pleaded guilty to killing and dismembering her sister and mother, earning herself the chilling nickname ‘The Sculptress’.

Journalist Rosalind Leigh knew this much before her first meeting with Olive, currently serving a life sentence.

How could Roz have foreseen that the encounter was destined to change her life – for ever?

‘Striking . . . Walters brings a shivery mastery to the old-fashioned British whodunit, with plotting as twisted as the characters’ secrets’ Kirkus ‘A dark, superbly plotted tale guaranteed to keep readers up most of the night’ Denver Post ‘Creepy but compulsive . . . hard to put down’

Minette Walters is a bestselling crime writer. She has won the CWA John Creasey Award for best first crime novel, the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best crime novel published in America and two CWA Gold Daggers for Fiction. She is the author of several bestsellers which have been adapted for television, including The Ice House and The Scold’s Bridle.

Minette lives in Dorset with her husband.

New York Times Book Review ‘Riveting’ Kansas City Star

10/01/2019 • £9.99 • 9781509870165 • Fiction • Paperback B Format • 464pp • Rights: WEL Excluding USA Non-Exclusive EU & EFTA

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Gomorrah Roberto Saviano The explosive international bestseller uncovering one of Naples’ most notorious organized criminal gangs.

With an introduction by Misha Glenny Gomorrah is a groundbreaking major international bestseller which has to date sold 750,000 copies in Italy alone. Since publishing his searing expose of their criminal activities, Roberto Saviano has received so many death threats from the Camorra that he has been assigned police protection. Known by insiders as ‘the System’, the Camorra, an organized crime network with a global reach and large stakes in construction, high fashion, illicit drugs and toxic-waste disposal, exerts a malign grip on cities and villages along the Neapolitan coast and is the deciding factor in why Campania has the highest murder rate in all of Europe and why cancer levels there have skyrocketed in recent years.

In pursuit of his subject, Roberto Saviano worked as an assistant at a Chinese textile manufacturer and on a construction site, both controlled by ‘the System’, and as a waiter at a Camorra wedding. Born in Naples, he recalls seeing his first murder at the age of fourteen, and how his own father, a doctor, suffered a brutal beating for trying to help an eighteen-year-old victim, left for dead in the street.

Gomorrah is both a bold and engrossing piece of investigative writing and one heroic young man’s impassioned story of a place under the rule of a murderous organization.

Roberto Saviano was born in Naples, where he still lives.

10/01/2019 • £9.99 • 9781509882182 • Non-Fiction • Paperback B Format • 336pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN

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King Leopold’s Ghost A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa Adam Hochschild A riveting and highly readable account of the Congo massacre, peopled by callous monarchs, corrupt adventurers and a handful of genuine heroes.

With an introduction by Barbara Kingsolver In the late 1890s Edmund Morel, a young British shipping company official working in Antwerp, began to notice something that made him suspicious.

‘All the tension and drama that one would expect in a good novel’ Robert Harris

When his company’s ships docked from the Congo, the new colony that the Belgian king, Leopold II, had just carved out for himself, they were filled with immensely valuable cargoes of rubber and ivory. Yet when they sailed back to Africa, they carried nothing in exchange.

Nothing, that is, except soldiers, military supplies and firearms. Horrified, Morel realized that there could be only one source for the lucrative cargo: slave labour on a vast scale. He abandoned his job and swiftly became the greatest investigative journalist of his time. A man of torrential energy and conviction, Morel almost singlehandedly made the Congo’s slave-labour regime, and the millions of lives it took, into a cause that would unite the whole world.

‘A history like none other . . . an amazing book’ Tariq Ali, Financial Times Adam Hochschild teaches writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. He lives in San Francisco with his wife. His most recent book is Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939.

10/01/2019 • £9.99 • 9781509882205 • Non-Fiction • Paperback B Format • 400pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN Non-Exclusive EU & EFTN

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Rebecca Skloot The internationally bestselling story of a young woman whose death in 1951 changed medical science for ever . . .

With an introduction by author of The Tidal Zone, Sarah Moss Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. Born a poor black tobacco farmer, her cancer cells – taken without her knowledge – became a multimillion-dollar industry and one of the most important tools in medicine. Yet Henrietta’s family did not learn of her ‘immortality’ until more than twenty years after her death, with devastating consequences . . .

‘No dead woman has done more for the living . . . A fascinating, harrowing, necessary book.’

Hilary Mantel, Guardian

Rebecca Skloot’s fascinating account is the story of the life, and afterlife, of one woman who changed the medical world for ever. Balancing the beauty and drama of scientific discovery with dark questions about who owns the stuff our bodies are made of, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is an extraordinary journey in search of the soul and story of a real woman, whose cells live on today in all four corners of the world.

Now a HBO film starring Oprah Winfrey and Rose Byrne.

‘An extraordinary mix of memoir and science reveals the story of how one woman’s cells have saved countless lives.’

Daily Telegraph ‘A heartbreaking account of racism and injustice . . . Moving and magnificent.’

Metro

Rebecca Skloot is an award-winning science writer whose articles have appeared in the New York Times Magazine and O, the Oprah Magazine, among others. She has worked as a correspondent for NPR’s RadioLab and PBS’s Nova ScienceNOW, and blogs about science, life, and writing at Culture Dish, hosted by Seed magazine. She also teaches creative non-fiction at the University of Memphis.

10/01/2019 • £9.99 • 9781509877027 • Non-Fiction • Paperback B Format • 464pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN

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The Master and Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov A fully annotated translation of the most complete text of Bulgakov’s exuberant comic masterpiece.

A literary sensation from its first publication, The Master and Margarita has become an astonishing phenomenon in Russia and has been translated into more than twenty languages, and made into plays and films. Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel is now considered one of the seminal works of twentieth-century Russian literature.

In this imaginative extravaganza the Devil, disguised as a magician, descends upon Moscow in the 1930s with his riotous band, which includes a talking cat and an expert assassin. Together they succeed in comically befuddling a population which denies the Devil’s existence, even as it is confronted with the diabolic results of a magic act gone wrong. This visit to the world capital of atheism has several aims, one of which concerns the fate of the Master, a writer who has written a novel about Pontius Pilate, and is now in a mental hospital.

‘Funny and frightening’ London Review of Books ‘Incandescent . . . one of those novels that, even in translation, make you feel that not one word could have been written differently . . . it has too many achievements to list, but the way it keeps faith in love and art even in moments of unspeakable humiliation and cruelty must be the greatest’ New York Times

By turns acidly satiric, fantastic and ironically philosophical, this work constantly surprises and entertains, as the action switches back and forth between the Moscow of the 1930s and first-century Jerusalem. The commentary and afterword provide new insight into the mysterious subtexts of the novel, and here The Master and Margarita is revealed in all its complexity.

Mikhail Bulgakov was a novelist and playwright. His best known work, The Master and Margarita, has been called one of the masterpieces of the twentieth century.

10/01/2019 • £9.99 • 9781509823291 • Fiction • Paperback B Format • 384pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN Non-Exclusive EU & EFTA

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Lucky Alice Sebold A hard-hitting and redemptive memoir from Alice Sebold, bestselling author of The Lovely Bones.

With an introduction by Madeline Miller In Lucky, a memoir hailed for its searing candour and wit, Alice Sebold reveals how her life was utterly transformed when, as an eighteen-year-old college freshman, she was brutally raped and beaten in a park near campus.

What propels this chronicle of her recovery is Sebold’s indomitable spirit – as she struggles for understanding (‘After telling the hard facts to anyone, from lover to friend, I have changed in their eyes’); as her dazed family and friends sometimes bungle their efforts to provide comfort and support; and as, ultimately, she triumphs, managing through grit and coincidence to help secure her attacker’s arrest and conviction.

‘A rueful, razor-sharp memoir . . .

Sebold tells what it’s like to go through a particular kind of nightmare in order to tell what it’s like – slowly, bumpily, triumphantly – to heal.’

In a narrative by turns disturbing, thrilling, and inspiring, Alice Sebold illuminates the experience of trauma victims even as she imparts wisdom profoundly hard-won: ‘You save yourself or you remain unsaved.’

Sarah Kerr, Vogue ‘Ms. Sebold [has] the ability to capture both the ordinary and the extraordinary, the banal and the horrific, in lyrical, unsentimental prose.’

Alice Sebold is the author of the bestselling novels The Lovely Bones and The Almost Moon, and the memoir Lucky. She lives in California.

New York Times

10/01/2019 • £8.99 • 9781509873937 • Non-Fiction • Paperback B Format • 256pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN

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How Proust Can Change Your Life Alain de Botton A fascinating and illuminating look at Proust’s most famous works by renowned philosopher Alain de Botton.

With an introduction by David Baddiel In How Proust Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton dissects what Proust has to say about friendship, reading, looking carefully, paying attention, taking your time, being alive, all while adding in his own delicious commentary.

The result is an immersive and invigorating exploration of Proust’s famous works.

‘It contains more human interest and play of fancy than most fiction . . . de Botton, in emphasizing Proust’s healing, advisory aspects, does us the service of rereading him on our behalf, providing of that vast sacred lake a sweet and lucid distillation’

Alain de Botton is the author of eight bestselling books including The Consolations of Philosophy, The Art of Travel and Essays in Love. He was born in 1969 and lives in London. For more information, consult: www.alaindebotton.com.

John Updike, New Yorker

10/01/2019 • £8.99 • 9781509870691 • Non-Fiction • Paperback B Format • 224pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN

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The Road Cormac McCarthy Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, The Road tells the story of a father and son as they journey across a postapocalyptic landscape that has destroyed most of civilization.

With an introduction by novelist John Banville In Cormac McCarthy’s astonishing post-apocalyptic novel a father and his young son walk alone through burned America, heading slowly for the coast. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind.

They have nothing but a pistol to defend themselves against the men who stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food – and each other.

‘The first great masterpiece of the globally warmed generation. Here is an American classic which, at a stroke, makes McCarthy a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature.’

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Memorial Black Prize for Fiction, The Road is an American classic, and a masterpiece of dystopian fiction.

Adapted into a film in 2009, starring Viggo Mortensen and directed by John Hillcoat.

Andrew O’Hagan ‘McCarthy conjures from this pitiless flight the miracle of unswerving humanity.

Gripping beyond belief.’

Chris Cleave, Sunday Telegraph ‘One of the most shocking and harrowing but ultimately redemptive books I have read. It is an intensely intimate story. It is also a warning.’

Cormac McCarthy is the author of many highly acclaimed novels, including Blood Meridian, All The Pretty Horses and No Country For Old Men. Among his honours are the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

He won the Pulitzer Prize for The Road.

Kirsty Wark, Observer ‘Books of the Year’ ‘So good that it will devour you. It is incandescent.’

Daily Telegraph

10/01/2019 • £8.99 • 9781509870639 • Fiction • Paperback B Format • 320pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN Non-Exclusive EU & EFTA

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The Master Colm Tóibín Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2004, a remarkable novel about Henry James, the American-born novelist and a connoisseur of exile.

With an introduction by award-winning novelist Tessa Hadley In January 1895 Henry James anticipates the opening of his first play, Guy Domville, in London. The production fails, and he returns, chastened and humiliated, to his writing desk. The result is a string of masterpieces, but they are produced at a high personal cost.

In The Master Colm Tóibín captures the exquisite anguish of a man who circulated in the grand parlours and palazzos of Europe, who was astonishingly vibrant and alive in his art, and yet whose attempts at intimacy inevitably failed him and those he tried to love. It is a powerful account of the hazards of putting the life of the mind before affairs of the heart.

‘An audacious, profound, and wonderfully intelligent book.’

Hermione Lee, Guardian ‘A marvel of lightly worn research and modulated tone.’

John Updike, New Yorker ‘A must read. Colm Tóibín has not only written a spectacular novel he has found a way to pay tribute to Henry James. We should all be so gifted and so lucky.’

Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones and Lucky

Colm Tóibín was born in Ireland in 1955. He is the author of several novels, including Brooklyn, the 2009 Costa Novel of the Year, The Master, which was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize and winner of the LA Times Book Prize and the IMPAC Book Award, and The Blackwater Lightship, which was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize and the 2001 IMPAC Award. His non-fiction includes Bad Blood, Homage to Barcelona, The Sign of the Cross and Love in a Dark Time. His work has been translated into seventeen languages. He lives in Dublin.

10/01/2019 • £9.99 • 9781509870530 • Fiction • Paperback B Format • 368pp • Rights: WEL Excluding US CAN

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