Landor's Tower: Or Imaginary Conversations. This item is unavailable.Landor's Tower: Or Imaginary Conversations

A writer, who has lived for years in London, reluctantly acknowledges his growing obsession with the Ewyas Valley on the border of England and Wales. Commissioned to write about Walter Savage Landor's disastrous attempt to set up a senatorial estate around Llanthony Abbey, he is sidetracked by more recent conspiracies: a bizarre series of twenty-seven suicides in the secret defence industries and unreliable witnesses who claim to have uncovered the truth about the Thorpe case. A burnt-out media bum called Kaporal, employed to research these events, sends the narrator taped reports from his journeys up and down the M4, tapes that come to seem like messages thrown over the side by a lost and fraudulent round-the-world sailor - are they evidence, or deranged fictions, contrived to keep Kaporal on the payroll? The valley is revealed as the site of persistent attempts to found or imagine utopian communities, all fascinated by the mythology of the west. The narrator is accused of one of the murders that Kaporal is researching. Incarcerated in an asylum on the River Usk, long-suppressed memories of his childhood in Wales return to haunt him.This is Iain Sinclair's first novel for eight years, and his first book to be set outside London.

'This is Wales seen from a car driven by Hunter S. Thompson with Joseph Conrad and Alan Ginsberg as passengers... As with Withnail and I, you can get very lost in the world of this marvellous book, governed by its own irresistible logic' Russell Celyn Jones, The Times 'Sinclair's use of tight-lipped, desiccated prose is at times reminiscent of John Banville. When he cartwheels across a page, his blurr is almost the shade of James Joyce - plus there's the clear ironic glitter of Don DeLillo, a kind of compressed, intelligent prong. But Sinclair is reminiscent of no-one but himself. His writing sings' Scotsman 'Landor's Tower, like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, holds you captive' Sunday Telegraph