Victory

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2020**Two timely novellas exploring male sexual violence, power and corruption Victory makes a convincing case for James Lasdun as one of the most incisive investigators of the human heart writing in English today An instant masterpiece Johanna Thomas-Corr, ObserverLove and hate, desire and guilt, friendship and betrayal these are the coordinates that drive James Lasdun s two intensely gripping, darkly comic novellas of men and women caught between their irrational passions and the urge for control. In Feathered Glory the seemingly happy marriage of a school principal and his artist wife reveals dangerous fault-lines as an old lover reappears in the husband s life. The past also haunts the present in Afternoon of a Faun, where an accusation of historic sexual assault plunges Marco Rosedale, an English journalist in New York, into a series of deepening crises. Together these stories offer a sharply observed vision that will resonate with anyone interested in the clash of power and desire in our embattled contemporary lives.