Accident

Accident, Nicholas Mosley's brilliantly conceived and efficiently structured novel about Oxford University and environs, is a prose poem about marriage and infidelity, as well as the relationship between writing and existence, imagination and action. It is a study of the games academics play both with their students and with themselves, on campus and off, in bed or on the cricket fields or baronial halls of the landed gentry. By probing the mind of one philosopher-don, Stephen, who has second thoughts about what constitutes an "accident," Mosley gives us an unforgettable view of life at the top or tip of the academic heights, in addition to a moving story of love and betrayal.

Nicholas Mosley was born in London on June 25, 1923 and was educated at Eton and Oxford. He served in Italy during World War II, and published his first novel, Spaces of the Dark, in 1951. Since then, he has published sixteen works of fiction, including the novels Accident, Impossible Object, and Hopeful Monsters, winner of the 1990 Whitbread Award. Mosley is also the author of several works of nonfiction, most notably the autobiography Efforts at Truth and a biography of his father, Sir Oswald Mosley, entitled Rules of the Game/Beyond the Pale. He currently resides in London.