Querelle of Brest - Jean Genet

Jean Genet's notorious novel follows a young sailor at large in the fetid, stinking port of Brest. Querelle is an assassin, dealer in opium, homosexual, thief and traitor. His encounters with the port's inhabitants - his superior officer, Lt Seblon, Mario, the brother-keeper's husband, a murderer in hiding - lead to a series of violent and shocking adventures.A truly remarkable and perverse achievement, Querelle of Brest deals in a startling way with the theme of murder as an act of total liberation.'Here is one of the great writers of our times, whose mythopoeic faculties, however bizarre and outrageous, rival Dostoevsky's.' Sunday Telegraph