Tornado Pratt

"A tour de force of considerable brilliance. Ableman was always a writer with a real gift for mimicking the way unusual people express themselves. What he has done here is to take a monster and make him rather endearing simply by being true to every stray movement of his mind, with a result that is at once sordid and sublime, and overwhelmingly comic as it zooms back and forth from stars to gutter. You could warm your hands on the crackle of the prose, too." —The Guardian

This brilliant and startlingly American novel presents a Yankee tycoon's explosive career paralleling the boom-and-bust Twentieth Century. By the American-educated English author of the outrageous novel I Hear Voices, it was published originally in 1977 but only in Great Britain, where it was hailed by the likes of Anthony Burgess and Auberon Waugh, among many others. The eponymous main character is not likely to win kudos for political correctness, since his story is something of a fictional cross between Hunter Thompson and P. J. O'Rourke. In some respects he even bears a certain resemblance to the current president. This first-person, deranged narrative leaps out at one as being the exemplar of its type.

"The last of the old-fashioned American tycoons: a violent, selfish, primitive cowboy of a man, with an outrageous lust for life, booze and women. . . .Now he lies dying in some faraway and expensive hotel, and his life flickers before his eyes like a screen on which a thousand movies are playing at the same time. . . .Pratt ought to be awful: a coarse, powerful, greedy man at the terminus of his life. But it is impossible not to like somebody with so strong a lust for the sweet green ball of earth, and such perceptive and wry obituary honesty about himself. Like its hero and villain, old Tornado himself, his autobiography is extravagant, rambling, and interesting." — The London Times