Osborne here delivers his trademark eloquence, rage and devastating wit. A Sense of Detachment satirises our heartless, profiteering society, while defending timeless human values. The End of Me Old Cigar examines the decadent lives of a collection of leading media figures. The television play Jill and Jack is a comic gem that satirises the conventions of its own genre while also being a close study of sexual warfare. A Place Calling Itself Rome is a powerful reworking of Shakespeare's Coriolanus.

A magnificent achievement and an utterly engrossing experience, Ghostwritten is a novel set at the fugitive edges of Asia and Europe, featuring a whole host of characters. An apocalyptic cult member carries out a gas attack on a rush-hour metro, but what connects him to a jazz buff in downtown Tokyo? A woman on a holy mountain talks to a tree - and the tree talks back - unaware of the effect the financial irregularities of a burnt-out lawyer will have on her life. A Mongolian gangster, a redundant English spy in Saint Petersburg with a knack for forging masterpieces, a despondent 'zookeeper', a nuclear scientist, a ghostwriter, a ghost, and a late night New York DJ whose hard-boiled scepticism has been his undoing - all have tales to tell.Add to this saxophones and causality, Buddha, cherry blossoms, island cities, a mind unhooked from memory, the Trans Siberian Express, hidden narratives of the new world's order, circles and roulette in London, 'The White Album', Baggins...