Breakfast in the Ruins

Karl Glogauer is a twelve-year-old racketeer in Calcutta, a Jewish violin-player in Auschwitz, an anarchist in Kiev, a derelict in the ruins of London, 1990.

In this extraordinary novel, Michael Moorcock creates a character with eighteen different lives. Incarnations of Karl Glogauer appear in Shanghai, Kenya, Budapest, New York City, and South Africa, spanning the globe and traveling through history in a scathing indictment of the human condition.

Karl is sometimes victim, sometimes villain, but always enmeshed in a political crisis that defies easy moral solution. Parallel to this journey through time and space is the personal odyssey of a modern-day Karl – his painful self-discovery and his shocking sexual liberation.