Rates of Exchange

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize: In this comedic novel, an English professor collides with disaster at the peak of the Cold War

Shortly after his plane first grazes the tarmac in the eastern European nation of Slaka, Dr. Angus Petworth is beset by a cavalcade of misadventures. A university lecturer and seasoned international traveler, Petworth is nevertheless unprepared for the oddities of culture and circumstance that await him on the other side of the iron curtain. In two eventful weeks, Petworth gives an incendiary interview, is seduced by a femme fatale, and becomes embroiled in a plot of international intrigue, all of which conspire to give the mild, unassuming professor way more than he bargained for.

Satirizing everything from critics and diplomats to Marxism and academia, Malcolm Bradbury'sRates of Exchange is a witty and lighthearted novel of cultural interchange at the height of the Cold War.

Malcolm Bradbury (1932–2000) was a well-known novelist, critic, and academic, as well as founder of the creative writing department at the University of East Anglia. He was the author of seven novels, includingThe History Man and Rates of Exchange, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He was knighted in 2000 for services to literature and died the same year.