Dorian

Dorian - Will Self''s brilliant ''imitation'' of Oscar Wilde''s original tainted love story

''Brutal, savage, infinitely readable'' Observer

''Chilling, hysterical, tasteless and haunting. A Gothic thriller complementing and enriching its original'' Independent on Sunday

In the summer of 1981, aristocratic, drug-addicted Henry Wooten and Warhol-acolyte Baz Hallward meet Dorian Gray. Dorian is a golden adonis - perfect, pure and (so far) deliciously uncorrupted. The subject of Baz''s video installation, Cathode Narcissus, and the object of Henry''s attentions, Dorian is launched on a hedonistic binge that spans the ''80s and ''90s. But as Baz and Henry succumb to the disease du jour, how is it that Dorian, despite all his sexual and narcotic debauchery, remains so unsullied - so vibrantly alive?

''A book that filled its first reviewers with "the odour of moral and spiritual putrefaction" just got smellier, darker and funnier'' Obse