THE MAN WITH THE CHOCOLATE EGG

The man is a young British soldier in the early 1960s, and the chocolate egg is a handgrenade, one of many which he has stolen to supply a terrorist group led by his brother. In London to deliver the grenade, he is taken ill with fever and is unable to find his brother. After narrowly avoiding a street accident in which he sees another man killed, he is drawn into that man's funeral and caught up in an unnerving succession of events, encounters and coincidences made more nightmarish by his own fears and obsessions. Back at camp he is arrested and interrogated but escapes to find his way back to London where the mounting anguish and suspense is brought to a final horrific climax. The book was awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and acclaimed by the critics, who made comparisons with the work of Franz Kafka and Graham Greene, Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel and Francisco Goya.