Byzantium Endures: The First Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet

(Paperback)

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Meet Pyat: Tsarist rebel, Nazi thug, continental con man and reactionary counterspy. He is the dark and dangerous antihero of the legendary Michael Moorcock's most controversial work. Published in 1981to great critical acclaim - then condemned and unavailable in the United States for thirty years - Byzantium Endures is the story of a cocaine addict, sexual adventurer and obsessive anti-Semite whose journey from Leningrad to London connects him with those from Trotsky to Makhno, and whose career echoes that of the twentieth century's descent into Fascism and total war.

Reviews

"What is extraordinary about this novel...is the largeness of the design. Moorcock has the bravura of a nineteeth-century novelist: he takes risks, he uses fiction as if it were a divining rod for the age's most significant concerns. Here, in Byzantium Endures, he has taken possession of the early twentieth century, of a strange, dead civilization and recast them in a form which is highly charged without ceasing to be credible."
--Peter Ackroyd, Sunday Times

"A tour de force, and an extraordinary one. Mr. Moorcock has created in Pyatnitski a wholly sympathetic and highly complicated rogue... There is much vigorous action here, along with a depth and an intellectuality, and humor and color and wit as well."
--The New Yorker

"Clearly the foundation on which a gigantic literary edifice will, in due course, be erected. While others build fictional molehills, Mr. Moorcock makes plans for great shimmering pyramids. But the footings of this particular edifice are intriguing and audacious enough to leave one hungry for more. "
--John Naughton, Listener

Author Bio

Michael Moorcock is the author of numerous novels, including the Elric series, Cornelius Quartet, Gloriana, and The White Wolf's Son. He has received the Nebula, World Fantasy, and British Science Fiction awards and is a Grandmaster of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. As editor of the science fiction magazine New Worlds, he was one of the progenitors of the controversial New Wave movement. His nonfiction works have appeared in the Daily Telegraph, Guardian, and New Statesman. He lives in Bastrop, Texas. Alan Wall is a novelist, a short story writer, a poet, an essayist, and a professor of writing and literature at the University of Chester. His novels include Bless the Thief, China, The Lightning Cage, The School of Night, and Sylvie's Riddle.