Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock

(Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

About the Book

"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.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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Praise for Brighton Rock

“Here the probing is carried further in a brilliant and uncompromising indictment of some of the worst aspects of modern civilization, showing us the hard-boiled criminal mind not as a return to savagery but as a horrible perversion of cerebration.”The New York Times

Why does this bleak, seething and anarchic novel still resonate? Its energy and power is that of the rebellious adolescent, foreshadowing the rise of the cult of youth in the latter part of the 20th century.”The Guardian

“[Greene] believed his coldness vital for his art - 'There is,' he affirmed, 'a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer'.”—John Carey
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Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition Series

Notre-Dame de Paris
A Farewell to Arms
Mansfield Park
Northanger Abbey
Pride and Prejudice
The Whale Rider
Monkey King
The Wizard of Oz
Orlando
The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing
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About the Author

Graham Greene
Graham Greene was born in 1904. While at Balliol College, Oxford, he published his first book of verse. He continues to write throughout his lifetime, and is the author of The Third Man, Our Man in Havana, The Quiet American, and The End of the Affair, in addition to many other novels, short story collections, plays, essays, travel books, and film scripts. During World War II he served with the British Secret Intelligence Service. He died in 1991. More by Graham Greene
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About the Author

J. M. Coetzee
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 9, 1940, J. M. Coetzee studied first at Cape Town and later at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a PhD degree in literature. In 1972, he returned to South Africa and joined the faculty of the University of Cape Town. 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. He has also published a memoir, Boyhood: Scenes From a Provincial Life, and several essay collections. He has won many other literary prizes, including the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize. 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. In 2003, Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. More by J. M. Coetzee
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