"He loved America, but would America love him back ?" This is the dilemma facing Henderson Dores - shy, English, self-conscious and nearly forty - as he stands in the middle of Park Avenue, New York City, worrying. He has come to America to work - true - but he really hopes that it is America that will work on him. And, sure enough, it does - in no uncertain way. From New York his job takes him to the Deep South, to the isolated, tiny, hick town of Luxora Beach, Georgia (or is it Alabama ?). There, he encounters the bizarre millionaire Loomis Gage and his extraordinary, unreal and threatening family. Swiftly, Henderson finds himself baffled, alone and friendless, and, as events grow progressively more strange, comic and grotesque, he realises that all the defences he has to fall back on are those that his culture, upbringing, education and nationality provide. Can they possibly take the appalling strain ? He has grave doubts. William Boyd's new novel, a marvellous successor to A Good Man in Africa (winner of the 1981 Whitbread Award for a First Novel and the 1982 Somerset Maugham Award) and An Ice-Cream War, (winner of the John Llewelyn-Rhys Prize) will be hailed as a comic classic.