The bonfire of the vanities - Tom Wolfe

Sherman McCoy, Wall Street bond trader with a salary like a telephone number . . . Peter Fallow, expatriate Fleet Street gossip writer whose price is a free lunch . . . Larry Kramer, assistant DA with a lustful eye on the juror wearing brown lipstick . . . The Reverend Reggie Bacon, charismatic ghetto warlord, con man, and power in the streets . . .

The Bonfire of the Vanities welds their stories together on a night in the Bronx when a $48,000 Mercedes hits a street it shouldn't have been near with a girl in its tan leather bucket seat who shouldn't have been there at all. The next day a young black accident victim is in hospital in a coma and Sherman McCoy has booked himself a one-way ticket to disaster.

'One of the funniest, finest, and most dramatic American novels of recent times . . . the most enthralling book I've read in years' Paul Ableman, Evening Standard

'A superb human comedy and the first novel ever to get contemporary New York, in all its arrogance and shame and heterogeneity and insularity, exactly right' Washington Post Book World

'One of the most impressive novels of the decade' Library Journal

'Moves with a swift comic logic . . . An innovative and imaginative and intricate plot . . .welds Wolfe's descriptions of dinner parties, restaurant games, Wall Street trading, and courthouse chaos into more than a tour de force' Time

'An incandescent sizzler of a novel . . . debut of a Day-Glo Dickens' Sunday Times