Tono Bungay - Hardcover

Wells, H. G.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0755104234 ISBN 13: 9780755104239

Publisher: House of Stratus, 2002

Synopsis

Want to be rich, successful and beautiful? Healthy and strong? Look no further than Tono-Bungay - a new and powerful medicine that can change your life forever. Needless to say Tono Bungay was just another crackpot idea, a cheap bottle containing no more than an innocuous, and totally ineffectual liquid. But word of its powers had spread - and brought its entrepreneurial inventors the very wealth and fame it promised. Sardonic and hugely derisory, Tono Bungay can be read as a biting satire on the follies of English sensibilities. AUTHBIO: Known as the 'Father of Science Fiction', H G Wells was responsible for an entirely new genre of writing. It was his bold, daring and hugely innovative books that first introduced readers to the concepts of time travel, invisibility, genetic experimentation and interstellar invasion - ideas that have gone on to inspire future generations and given rise to the entire science fiction industry. Disturbingly accurate in his prophetic writing, H G Wells was also the author of a number of key sociological and historical works.

About this title

Review:

A brilliant satire on advertising and the popular press (GUARDIAN)

Wells' greatest literary achievement . . . manages to segue, quite smoothly and methodically, from Dickensian comedy to naturalist love story to sociological commentary to Victorian aeronautical adventure to erotic tragedy and, finally, to a kind of humanist threnody about the past, present and future of England (SALON)

A wide-ranging Condition of England novel that contains some of Wells's most powerful writing, especially its descriptions of London (David Lodge GUARDIAN)

About the Author:

Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946), known primarily as H. G. Wells, was a prolific English writer in many genres, including the novel, history, politics, and social commentary, and textbooks and rules for war games. He is now best remembered for his science fiction novels, and Wells is called the father of science fiction, along with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback. His most notable science fiction works include The Time Machine(1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898). Wells' earliest specialized training was in biology, and his thinking on ethical matters took place in a specifically and fundamentally Darwinian context. He was also from an early date an outspoken socialist, often (but not always, as at the beginning of the First World War) sympathising with pacifist views. His later works became increasingly political and didactic, and he wrote little science fiction, while he sometimes indicated on official documents that his profession was that of journalist. Novels like Kipps and The History of Mr Polly, which describe lower-middle-class life, led to the suggestion, when they were published, that he was a worthy successor to Charles Dickens, but Wells described a range of social strata and even attempted, in Tono-Bungay (1909), a diagnosis of English society as a whole.

About this edition

• Publisher: House of Stratus
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0755104234
• ISBN 13: 9780755104239
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 495