The Pentecost Papers
By (Author) Ferdinand Mount
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
2nd December 2025
17th July 2025
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
823.914
Hardback
304
Width 170mm, Height 246mm, Spine 44mm
500g
'Gloriously inventive, wonderfully entertaining, wickedly knowing . . . Read it and revel' JOHN BANVILLE
'The unsung hero of his generation of novelists . . . Astute, funny and heartbreaking' TANYA GOLD
Corruption, destruction, danger and murder: Welcome to the murky world of the super-rich.
Timothy Timbo Smith, part-time healer and self-styled security analyst, travels down the dark canyons of global capitalism, from short-selling scams in the City to the depleted rainforests of Brazil.
His accomplices in this irresistible safari through the late modern world are two reformed alcoholics, the lovely and brilliant Lee Lethal Thorold, and her husband Professor Luke Deverill, lecherous Oxford philosopher and caustic computer wizard. Their misadventures are followed at a bewildered distance by the played-out diplomatic correspondent Dickie Pentecost, who tags along mostly because Timbo is the only man who can cure his agonising back and is always one step behind the Machiavellian actions of those who precede him.
Readers who loved the authors earlier stinging satire, Making Nice, will find this novel an even more telling takedown of the way we live now but pretend we dont.
Praise for the author:
Mounts storytelling is irresistible LITERARY REVIEW
One of our finest prose stylists DAILY TELEGRAPH
[Mount] exposes such cold truths with such warmth I am in eternal awe of his writing, wherever I find it MARINA HYDE
The Pentecost Papers is gloriously inventive, wonderfully entertaining, wickedly knowing and simply an all-round treat. Ferdinand Mounts literary powers are undimming. Read it and revel -- JOHN BANVILLE, Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea
Ferdinand Mount is the unsung hero of his generation of novelists. He casts a wry eye over the cruelties and absurdities of the modern super rich. Astute, funny and heartbreaking -- TANYA GOLD
Ferdinand Mount is a novelist, essayist and former editor of the Times Literary Supplement from 1991 to 2002. As a political figure, he was head of the Number Ten Policy Unit. As a journalist, he has contributed regular columns to The Spectator, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times. His novel Of Love and Asthma, part of a six-volume series, A Chronicle of Modern Twilight, won the Hawthornden Prize in 1992. He lives in North London with his family.