The Anti-Death League

First edition. Crown 8vo. 352pp. Publisher's olive-brown cloth, lettered in gilt to spine. With the wrap-around dust-jacket designed by Raymond Hawkey (priced 30/- net to front flap). First impression; a second printing was re-issued by Gollancz in 1972, on behalf of the New Fiction Society.

Elegant signature to front endpaper, uniform offsetting to the endpapers with the usual Gollancz hairline crack to the inner hinges, else a very good copy in a slightly shelf-worn and nicked dust-jacket with minute edge tears.

Author's sixth novel. Anthony Burgess' choice of the 99 Best Novels in English since 1939. A mélange of genres artfully mixed in a surreal comedy of spies and soldiers who come to question their very purpose, set in 1960's England. "This can be described as a masque of ultimate bitterness – not against human institutions but against God – in the form of a secret weapon-and-spy story... Theologically unsound, The Anti-Death League is nevertheless a noble cry from the heart on behalf of human suffering." –Burgess.