Paul Bailey's career as a novelist began when a friend suggested that he turn away from writing plays, which had brought him little satisfaction. He sent the first seventy pages of a manuscript to publisher Jonathan Cape, where he found warm encouragement. The completed novel, At the Jerusalem (1967), won the Somerset Maugham Travel Award and an Arts Council of Great Britain Award (1968) as the best first novel published between 1965 and 1967. Since then, he has had five novels published, as well as many reviews and articles. Other awards have included the E.M. Forster Award, presented by the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1974), a Bicentennial fellowship (1976), and the George Orwell Memorial Prize (1978) for his essay "The Limitations of Despair," published in the Listener. He is widely regarded as one of the best among the younger generation of novelists in Great Britain. In a review of Bailey's latest novel...