Karoo

Oscar-winning writer Steve Tesich masterfully creates and destroys the sad, mad world of Saul Karoo. It was a tradition with the McNabs, George and Pat, to have a day-after-Christmas party but never before had the events of the world conspired to make the party so lively and so appropriate. There was so much to celebrate and talk about. There was Havel, the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, the collapse of Communism, Gorbachev and, for the next few days at least, there were all these Romanians with their delicious-sounding names. Karoo is an alcoholic who can't get drunk, a loving father who can't bear to be alone with his son, a fixer of film scripts who admits that he ruins every one of them. Calamity and comedy accompany Saul on his odyssey through sex, death and showbusiness as he seeks to 'fix' both a master director's greatest film and his own broken life at the same time. Originally published in 1998, Karoo has become widely recognised as a modern classic, a caustic, original and sharply observed portrait of 1980's New York.