Author(s): Matthew Kneale

Fiction

From the bestselling author of English Passengers, a collection of stories - funny, wise, audacious and exquisitely told - which, combined, build a powerful literary meditation on the world today. In his gripping new work, Matthew Kneale takes us on a journey around today's uncertain world. From England to South America, China to the Middle East, the United States to Africa, Kneale applies his gifts as a master storyteller, vividly capturing the lives of ordinary people as they struggle to live, and to do the right thing, often managing neither. From a smugly well-intentioned English family who leave their tour group in China to travel alone, and slowly becoming complicit in its violence, to a ploddingly respectable London lawyer who chances upon a stash of cocaine and discovers it offers the wealth and status he hungers for, to a self-doubting suicide bomber, Matthew Kneale transports readers across frontiers in an instant. He sets the foreign and the familiar side by side, and in doing so challenges our understanding of both. By turns painful, moving and wickedly funny, Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance gains momentum until the world seems to be revealed to us in a new way. This is a groundbreaking work by a master of the uncertainties of our time.