Synopses & Reviews
"Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him..."
Graham Greene's chilling exposé of violence and gang warfare in the pre-war underworld is a classic of its kind.
Pinkie, a teenage gangster on the rise, is devoid of compassion or human feeling, despising weakness of both the spirit and the flesh. Responsible for the razor slashes that killed mob boss Kite and also for the death of Hale, a reporter who threatened the livelihood of the mob, Pinkie is the embodiment of calculated evil. As a Catholic, however, Pinkie is convinced that his retribution does not lie in human hands.
He is therefore not prepared for Ida Arnold, Hale's avenging angel. Ida, whose allegiance is with life, the here and now, has her own ideas about the circumstances surrounding Hale's death. For the sheer joy of it, she takes up the challenge of bringing the infernal Pinkie to an earthly kind of justice.
This Penguin Classics Deluxe edition features an introduction by J. M. Coetzee.
Review
"No serious writer of [the twentieth century] has more thoroughly invaded and shaped the public imagination than Graham Greene." Time
Review
"A superlatively entertaining fictional presentation....There is not one character that can, by any chance, be forgotten nor one that could be set aside as untrue to life." The New York Times
Review
"In a class by himself...the ultimate chronicler of 20th-century man's consciousness and anxiety." William Golding, The Independent (U.K.)
Review
"This is by all means a book to read for sheer breathless excitement; but, much more, it is a book to read for its resolution about the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God." Saturday Review
Review
"The light and serious novels of Graham Greene make their impression because of his phenomenal skill, his invention, and the edge and decision of his mind. He etches the conventional with the acid of the observable." V. S. Pritchett, New Statesman
Synopsis
A gang war rages through the dark underworld of Brighton. Pinkie has killed a man. Believing he can escape retribution, he is unprepared for the courageous, life-embracing Ida Arnold, who is determined to avenge a death.
Synopsis
"Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him..."
A masterpiece of psycho-realism, this fascinating study of evil, sin, and the "appalling strangeness of the mercy of God" withholds easy judgement as a narrative takes us through the moral question of what is simultaneously fascinating and repellent.
Synopsis
In this classic novel of murder and menace, Graham Greene lays bare the soul of a boy of seventeen who stalks Brighton's tawdry boardwalk with apathy on his face and murder in his heart. Pinkie, the boy with death at his fingertips, is not just bad, he worships in the temple of evil, just as his parents worshipped in the house of God. Crime, in his dark mind, is a release so deep and satisfying that he has no need for drink or women or the love of his fellows. He is an astounding character, sinister and fascinating "a chilling specimen of the Adolf Hitler type," in the words of J. M. Coetzee.
Originally published in 1938, Brighton Rock is a novel of profound psychological mystery and chilling suspense. This Graham Greene Centennial Edition features a new introductory essay by Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee.
About the Author
Graham Greene (19041991) worked as a journalist and critic, and was later employed by the foreign office. His many books include
The Power and the Glory,
The Third Man,
Our Man in Havana,
The Comedians, and
Travels with My Aunt. He is the subject of an acclaimed three-volume biography by Norman Sherry.
Winner of the Novel Prize for Literature in 2003, John Michael Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 9, 1940. His works of fiction include Dusklands; Waiting for the Barbarians, which won South Africa's highest literary honor, the Central News Agency Literary Award; and The Life and Times of Michael K., for which Coetzee was awarded his first Booker Prize in 1983. In 1999 he again won Britain's prestigious Booker Prize for Disgrace, becoming the first author to win the award twice in its 31-year history.
Series Description
Penguin celebrates the centennial of Graham Greene's birth with commemorative editions of his greatest works.