Eating People is Wrong

Malcolm Bradbury's first novel is a timeless and brilliant fiction about the clash of cultures and generations which has beset academia since it began.

Malcolm Bradbury’s first novel is a timeless and brilliant fiction about the clash of cultures and generations which has beset academia since it began.

Eating People is Wrong is the debut novel by Malcolm Bradbury, the master of the campus novel.

Stuart Treece, a forty-year-old professor and head of English, now rather set in his ways (Hannibal Lecter is not on his syllabus), is made to feel somewhat alien by his encounters with a younger generation whose values are decidedly at odds with his own. In this witty tragi-comedy, the hero’s attempts to come to terms with his new situation are hilariously undermined when he finds himself instead falling in love with one of his graduate students, and busily fending off a student rival.

Eating People is Wrong established Bradbury’s ability to satirize the academic world and to create the campus novel, as with Stepping Westward and the prize-winning The History Man. Like its title, the book is funny, true and memorable.

‘The funniest book I have read this year’ – Daily Telegraph
‘It is both tough and sensitive, a brilliantly funny book and a really important first novel’ – Sunday Times
‘A sobering, satirical brilliance’ – The Times Literary Supplement

Now part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.