Serpent's Tail Website

A Very British Coup

Chris Mullin

Former steel worker Harry Perkins, has, against all the odds, led the Labour Party to a stunning victory at the general election. His manifesto includes the removal of American bases, public control of finance, and the dismantling of the newspaper monopolies. The Establishment is appalled by the prospect, and secretly decides that something must be... read more

The ASBO Show

Tony Saint

Council worker Roger has joined the ASBO unit because new departments are the best places to avoid work. Feeling oddly blank about the death of his father and wanting to escape the office, he goes to investigate a condemned tower block on the notorious Composer's estate.

Looking down from the third floor, Roger is mesmerised by the sight o... read more

African Psycho

Alain Mabanckou

Gregoire Nakobomayo, a petty criminal, has decided to kill his girlfriend Germaine. He’s planned the crime for some time, but still, the act of murder requires a bit of psychological and logistical preparation. Luckily, he has a mentor to call on, the far more accomplished serial killer Angoualima. The fact that Angoualima is dead doesn’t preve... read more

Against the Machine

Lee Siegel

Against the Machine is a fascinating look at how the Internet is reshaping the way we think about ourselves and the world. Siegel explores how the internet affects culture and social life, particularly the psychological, emotional and social cost of high-tech solitude. Arguing that the internet's widespread anonymity eliminates boundaries and encou... read more

The Alpine Fantasy of Victor B and Other Stories

Jeremy Akerman, Eileen Daly

Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, and Andy Warhol all wrote fiction – but there has never previously been a compilation of the prose of British artists. The Alpine Fantasy of Victor B and Other Stories brings together seventeen of Britain’s leading contemporary artists in one collection.

Moving, humorous and sometimes deeply macabre, these sto... read more

Altered State (Brand New Material)

Matthew Collin

From its first publication in 1997, Altered State established itself as the definitive text on Ecstasy and dance culture. This new edition sees Matthew Collin cast a fresh eye on the heady events of the acid house ‘Summer of Love’ and the rave scene’s euphoric escalation into commercial excess as MDMA became a mass-market narcotic. Altered St... read more

Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned

Walter Mosley

‘Socrates thought about a promise he’d made. He swore to himself that he’d never hurt another person...That way he could ease the evil deeds that he had perpetrated in the long evil life that he’d lived.’

Socrates Fortlow has spent 27 years in prison and can kill a man with his bare hands. But now he’s out and determined to use... read more

Antwerp

Nicholas Royle

A brutal killer, inspired by the Belgian artist Paul Delvaux, leaves each of his victims posed as if in a painting.

Meanwhile cult film director Johnny Vos is making a low-budget biopic about the same artist. He hires women from Antwerp’s red light district and from an internet voyeur house as extras in order to recreate the poses of ... read more

Artemisia

Anna Banti

First published in 1953, Artemisia immediately established itself as a classic. At the centre of the book is Artemisia Gentileschi, a painter influenced by Michelangelo and Caravaggio. A rising star in 17th-century Naples, Artemisia realises that success has been bought at too high a price – she has failed as a woman, a wife and a mother. The clo... read more

Back to the Badlands

John Williams

In the summer of 1989 John Williams donned a baseball cap and took off for the States to search out the mythical America of modern crime fiction – to find James Ellroy’s LA, Elmore Leonard’s sleazy South Beach of Miami, Sara Paretsky’s Chicago, and many others on an unnerving tour of the American underbelly. The result was Into the Badlands... read more

Bad Penny Blues

Cathi Unsworth

Police Constable Pete Bradley has done one year in the force and dreams of moving up the ladder. He's assigned as an aid to CID and working a routine nightshift with his partner when they stumble across a young woman's body. She was working as a prostitute when she was strangled, her body dumped by a riverbank. His search for her killer brings him ... read more

Banana Bottom

Claude McKay

In the early 1900s, Bita Plant returns to Jamaica after seven years of European education to live with Malcolm and Priscilla Craig – the white missionary benefactors who helped her become a cultivated young woman. They have Bita’s future mapped out: training at the mission and marrying a dedicated theological student. Reluctant to accept this f... read more

Banjo

Claude McKay

Lincoln Agrippa Daily, known to his drifter cohorts on the 1920s Marseille waterfront as ‘Banjo’, passes his days panhandling and dreaming of starting his own little band. At night Banjo, Malty, Ginger, Dengel, Bugsy, Taloufa, Goosey, and even Jake of Home to Harlem prowl the rough waterfront bistros, drinking, looking for women, playing music... read more

The Bank Robber Diaries

Danny King

‘I’d like to make a withdrawal’

Chris Benson idolises his older brother Gavin. In fact, everyone looks up to him. But then they have little choice when they are lying on their stomachs in the middle of the Halifax with a gun shoved in their face…

When Gavin gets sent down for a 15-year stretch the somewhat unprofessional t... read more

Bank of the Black Sheep

Robert Lewis

Ex-private investigator Robin Llywelyn wakes up handcuffed to a hospice bed, full of morphine and with a fading memory as the cancer closes in. Unfortunately, bad detectives leave a lot of loose ends. Prosecuted for crimes he can't remember committing and pursued by cops and criminals alike for deals he has no recollection of doing, he discovers th... read more

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Beer in the Snooker Club

Waguih Ghali

Ghali’s only novel, a classic of the literature of exile and emigration, is now a Serpent’s Tail Classic. read more

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Before Night Falls

Reinaldo Arenas

This shocking memoir by the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas is a book about sexual, political and artistic freedom. In Before Night Falls, Arenas recounts his journey from a poverty-stricken childhood in rural Cuba to his death in New York four decades later. He tells of his odyssey from young rebel fighting for the Revolution, through his suppressio... read more

The Belly of the Atlantic

Fatou Diome

Salie lives in Paris. Back home on the Senegalese island of Niodior, her football-crazy brother, Madické, counts on her to get him to France, the promised land where foreign footballers become world famous. Given his illusions, how can Salie explain to him the grim reality of life as an immigrant?

The story of Salie and Madické highligh... read more

Belonging

Ron Butlin

Scottish drifter Jack McCall, handyman in an Alpine ski resort, spends his days sneaking into the empty penthouses of the super-rich with his partner Anna, sipping champagne and partying in private jacuzzis. At 29, Jack’s unsure of what he wants from life, but Anna wants commitment. Then one night a man slips on a frozen balcony in a nearby apart... read more

Beneath the Blonde

Stella Duffy

Siobhan Forrester, lead singer of Beneath the Blonde, has everything a girl could want - stunning body, great voice, brilliant career, loving boyfriend. Now she has a stalker too. She can cope with the midnight flower deliveries and nasty phone calls, but things really turn sour when intimidation turns to murder.

Saz Martin, hired to seek ... read more

The Big Blowdown

George P. Pelecanos

Washington DC, 1946. For two local young men, Pete Karras and Joey Recevo, the easiest way to find work after the war is by providing a little muscle for a local boss who runs a protection racket with the Mafia. The trouble with Pete Karras is that he is just too soft on his fellow immigrants, and the last thing the boss wants is for his mob to get... read more

Black Betty

Walter Mosley

Five years have passed since the White Butterfly Affair, there’s a Kennedy in the White House and Martin Luther King is in the news. It might look like a new dawn for Black America but for Easy Rawlins times are only getting tougher - his real-estate empire is deep in the hole. Trouble comes knocking once more when Easy’s asked to find a missin... read more

Black Friday

David Goodis

It’s winter in Philadelphia. January cold coming in off two rivers. Hart is broke, freezing, looking for a place to lay low from the cops. If he can’t find somewhere soon he might do something rash – like steal an overcoat and accept a wallet containing $11,000 from a man dying from gunshot wounds in the street. Whoever killed him might have ... read more

Black Rock

Amanda Smyth

Celia’s mother died bringing her into the world - when one soul flies in, another flies out, her aunt Tassi says. So she lives with Tassi in Black Rock, Tobago, with her cousins and Tassi’s second husband Roman, a man so low he could crawl under a snake’s belly on stilts.

Everyone knows Roman is a bad man, but Tassi felt so lucky to... read more

Black Water Rising

Attica Locke

Reminiscent of early John Grisham and Walter Mosley, this taut, fast-paced novel heralds an exciting and powerful new voice in fiction. Big oil and its twin, corporate corruption, meet their match with Jay Porter, a struggling personal injury attorney down on his luck, who suddenly finds himself in a situation spiraling out of control. Jay knows a ... read more

Black Water Rising

Attica Locke

WOULD YOU RISK EVERYTHING TO SAVE A STRANGER? read more

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Blackwater

Jeremy Scahill

New edition of the international bestseller, updated material deals with the Nissour square massacre. read more

Blag

Tony Saint

Harry Verma – small-time immigration solicitor, nursing a sick father and a gambling habit – has taken to pulling more than just the odd legal aid fraud to help pay his unpredictable creditors. Sean Carlisle – enforcement officer, collaring illegal immigrants for a living – is self-destructing. Booze, pills and bending the law to get result... read more

The Blonde on the Street Corner

David Goodis

'She took a final drag at the cigarette, flipped it away, and said, I don't get this line of talk. It's way over my head... Maybe you're waiting for some dream girl to come along in a coach drawn by six white horses, and she'll pick you up and haul you away to the clouds, where it's all milk and honey and springtime all year around. Maybe that's wh... read more

Blood on the Saddle

Rafael Reig

Dickens & Clot Investigations Ltd, a detective agency in a waterlogged, semi-buried Madrid of the near future, has a couple of unusual specialities: helping distraught authors and taking on Manex Chopeitia. The authors are frantically in search of characters who’ve quit the page and assumed a life of their own; Manex Chopeitia is the Big Brother ... read more