Justin Cartwright Biography
(1933– ), The Revenge, The Horse of Darius, Interior, Masai Dreaming, Look At It This Way
British novelist, born in South Africa, educated at Trinity College, Oxford; he worked as a maker of documentary films and commercials before becoming a full-time writer. Cartwright's early novels The Revenge (1978) and The Horse of Darius (1980) are skilfully plotted thrillers about assassination attempts against powerful political figures. He first received considered acclaim for Interior (1989), a compelling serio-comic narrative set in South and West Africa which centres on the main protagonist's hazardous search for his missing father. Also set chiefly in Africa, Masai Dreaming (1993) sustains thematic tension between the rumoured barbarism of that continent and the stark barbarism of Nazi Germany. The vividly documentary satire of London as a zone of polarized social conditions in Look At It This Way (1990) anticipates the centrality of the city to In Every Face I Meet (1995), Cartwright's most highly regarded novel; the events of the novel take place mainly on one day in 1990, when Nelson Mandela's imminent freedom begins to re-vitalize the importent idealism of an investment banker before events embroil him in murder charges.
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Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern FictionEncyclopedia of Literature: Henry Carey Biography to Chekhov Biography