The Birthday Party - Softcover

"Both a serious meditation on masculinity and commercial power...and a rollicking beach-read...fans of Karnezis will not be disappointed. Marco is a huge and splendidly flawed hero for a five-star novel" (The Times)

"Such careful and subtle patterning confirms Karnezis as a novelist of unusual gifts" (Financial Times)

"Karnezis's wise fable gestures towards a dawning era, in which vacuous yet powerful celebrity finds its ultimate apotheosis" (Guardian)

"In prose as clear as the Mediterranean Sea...this is a richly detailed portrait of a man who could so easily have been sketched as a cartoon villain. It's a story about the power of stories themselves, and the countless ways we can all rewrite our pasts and twist our futures" (Daily Mail)

"The reader grows to love his detestable characters and this, along with the way he takes the mundane and cranks it up into madness, is the secret of Karnezis' appeal" (Independent on Sunday)

It is the summer of 1975. As dawn breaks on a small private island off the Mediterranean coast, Marco Timoleon, an aging tycoon, wakes up to see the final preparations for his troubled daughter's twenty-fifth birthday party. Having found out that she is pregnant by a man he doesn't approve of, he secretly intends to persuade her to terminate the pregnancy: the family doctor stands by to perform the operation on the spot. But as the day unfolds, his plan is put to the test and comes to an unexpected conclusion.