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  • Published: 4 April 2013
  • ISBN: 9780241964996
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $32.99

Dark Diversions




A pitch-black comic novel about money and corruption from one of the world's leading thinkers

Intrigue, prestige, debauchery: Dark Diversions by acclaimed author John Ralston Saul is a black comedy of international proportions.

From aristocrats and the privileged circles of New York and Paris to military dictators and the political infighting, double-dealing and corruption or their regimes in Morocco and Haiti, welcome to the world where money and power reside. Through a series of encounters with its inhabitants, at once beguiling and grotesque, our investigative narrator uncovers bizarrre and disturbing stories of secret lovers, exiled princesses, religious heresies and murder. But as he becomes further enmeshed in this savage realm, his ambiguous status becomes increasingly unsettling: is he the impartial observer of priviliged foibles and fundamental inequity he appears to be? Or is he, perhaps, an embodiment of the dark diversions he chronicles?

Laced with scathing wit, Dark Diversions is a novel that inveigls its reader on a picaresque journey of depravity.

  • Published: 4 April 2013
  • ISBN: 9780241964996
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $32.99

About the author

John Ralston Saul

John Ralston Saul's philosophical trilogy - Voltaire's Bastards, The Doubter's Companion and The Unconscious Civilization - has had a growing impact on political thought in many countries. A further work, On Equilibrium, is a persuasive and groundbreaking exploration of the human struggle for personal and social balance.
Mr. Saul has written five novels, including The Birds of Prey and The Field Trilogy. These works deal with the crisis of modern power and its clash with the individual. Like his non-fiction, his novels have been translated into many languages.
He has received many national and international awards for his work. The Unconscious Civilization won the 1996 Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction as well as the Gordon Montador Award for Best Canadian Book on Social Issues. His reinterpretation of the nature of Canada , Reflections of a Siamese Twin, also won a Montador Award and was chosen by Macfean's magazine as one of the ten best non-fiction books of the twentieth century. His novel The Paradise Eater won the Premio Lettarario Internazionate in Italy. Most recently he received the Pablo Neruda Medal in celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Neruda's birth.
Mr. Saul was born in Ottawa and studied at McGill University and the University of London, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1972.

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