Water Music

It is Harvard in the early 1960s. Just off campus, Dr Timothy Leary plays host for his PhD students, laying on a spread of cocktails, pizza and LSD. Among the guests is Fitzhugh Loney, a psychology student, and his librarian wife Joanie. Married young, and both diligently and unglamorously toiling to support their son, they are not the sort of people one would expect to be seduced by the nascent drug culture. But their nights on LSD prove so extraordinary – so revelatory, so earth-shattering, so...

When Delaney Mossbacher knocks down a Mexican pedestrian, he neither reports the accident nor takes his victim to hospital. Instead the man accepts $20 and limps back to poverty and his pregnant 17-year-old wife, leaving Delaney to return to his privileged life in California. But these two men are fated against each other, as Delaney attempts to clear the land of the illegal immigrants who he thinks are turning his state park into a ghetto, and a boiling pot of racism and prejudice threatens to...

BY THE WINNER OF THE JONATHAN SWIFT PRIZE 2017 A dynamic new collection from one of our most original storytellers: satirical, surreal and very much of the moment. In these stories, T. C. Boyle focuses his unerring eye on humanitys relationship with nature, and the unintended consequences of our efforts to control it. The prize-winning Are We Not Men? reflects on the impact of new gene-editing technologies while The Relive Box parodies our obsession with electronic games. In Shes the Bomb, a...

Guy Schermerhorn, brilliant young professor of psychology and disciple of the pioneering Dr Moncrieff, is making a name for himself on the talk show circuit with an unusual protege in tow: a chimp by the name of Sam. Sam lives in Guy's apartment, wears diapers and neckties, devours pizza and Macdonalds – and, through Guy's careful training, can communicate through sign language. But living with Sam is wreaking havoc on Guy's personal life, and when shy, meek undergraduate Aimee...

Star has travelled to Drop City - forty-seven sun-washed acres of commune in California - to be free from her home, from society's constraints, and to feel part of something important. But she starts to suspect that free love was invented by some spotty dude who couldn't get laid any other way, and that chilled out means lazy. And as for peace-living, there seems to be an ugly undercurrent of violence. Then, when rape charges are brought and the police threaten to close down Drop City,...

For one woman, a cross-country train ride becomes a parallel journey into the dark psyche of American manhood. An old man and his neighbour enter strike up a friendship that might a more sinister battle of wits than he first thinks. A man, waiting for his wife in a bar on Valentine's Day, is plagued by a stranger who claims to be clairvoyant. In electric prose T. C. Boyle explores myriad facets of society: greed and excess, parenthood and responsibility, the digital world and the way we...