Russian born Dominic is one of the success stories of the eighties, when yuppies made fortunes on the stock market .
Ray Tebbutt is among the unlucky ones. He was involved in a bankruptcy in the mid-eighties .
Peter Petrik, a dissident Czech film director, lives in Prague, dreaming of making more films when times improve .
The lifelines of these people and others – comic and sad by turns in true Aldiss fashion – converge towards the finality of an IRA bomb epuisode in Great Yarmouth.
Brian Aldiss, OBE, is a fiction and science fiction writer, poet, playwright, critic, memoirist and artist. He was born in Norfolk in 1925. After leaving the army, Aldiss worked as a bookseller, which provided the setting for his first book, The Brightfount Diaries (1955). His first published science fiction work was the story ‘Criminal Record’, which appeared in Science Fantasy in 1954. Since then he has written nearly 100 books and over 300 short stories.