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.
Michael Moorcock (born 1939) is a prolific English writer primarily of science fiction and fantasy. Moorcock's most popular works have been the Elric novels, starring the character Elric of Melniboné. In 2008 the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named him as a Grandmaster of SF.
