A postmodern detective story, a scathing send-up of the rapacious
eighties, a macabre Gothic - all rolled up in a bravura tragicomic
entertainment. The Winshaw family, as their official biographer is
warned by old Mortimer Winshaw himself, is 'the meanest, greediest,
cruellest bunch of backstabbing penny-pinching bastards who ever crawled
across the face of the earth.' Bankers, industrialists, politicians,
arms dealers and media barons - they rule Britannia, more or less. They
also have a guilty secret in the shape of a mad aunt stashed away in a
remote asylum, convinced of familial treachery during World War II and
determined to effect the ruin of her entire clan. In the summer of 1990,
while Saddam Hussein is provoking yet another war, the Winshaws'
biographer (a severely depressed young novelist) is piecing together the
truth of their sordid legacy, and discovers that it converges bizarrely
with the plot of a film he's been obsessed by since childhood. Moreover,
it seems that all of this, dynasty and cinema alike, has some mysterious
connection with his own troubled history. Of course whether he - or
anybody else - will be alive when this compound riddle is solved remains
to be seen. Savagely funny, hugely inventive and passionately political,
The Winshaw Legacy assumes Dickensian proportions as it excoriates the
modern age of greed - and heralds the American debut of an extraordinary
writer.
