The Charlatan Variations — David Gurr

From the award-winning author of the Ring Master comes this novel autobiography - or autobiographical novel. Born into an aristocratic British family as William Le Breton Harvey Brisbane-Bedwell in 1936, the protagonist meets Einstein and Hitler as a child, witnesses American troops mustering for D-Day, and looses his father during the Blitzkrieg. He serves in the Royal Navy and becomes a highly successful author of political thrillers under the pseudonym David Courtney. From time to time, he teaches the tango aboard cruise ships, and finds himself prospecting for gold and losing his soul in Papua New Guinea.

Written in the self-reflexive tradition of Cervantes' Don Quixote, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Melville's The Confidence Man, and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, David Gurr is often compared to Graham Greene as an unabashed charlatan, a literary confidence man who pushes at the borders of fiction and fact, art and reality to expose good and evil afoot in the world. That great charlatan, the devil, is not far behind.