Festival — Andre Jute

Festival
André Jute

When the formidable Iron Curtain conductor Vlaklos decides to defect to the West at the Adelaide Festival of Arts, consequent events electrify an elite group related through their loves, their hatreds, their secrets and their ambitions. Lovers and enemies alike have their price.

The rising impresario Ransome is torn between his fear for the life of the great conductor and his duty to his friend O'Neal, whose re-election as Premier depends on the smooth running of the Festival. A complication is Ransome's long friendship with Kerensky, the KGB's cultural watchdog over Vlaklos: if the conductor defects, Kerensky will be shot. Ransome also has to cope with the shifting political pressures applied to him from every side. All this while trying to run the largest arts festival in the world, with nobody to turn to except Mellie, his fiancée. And even she, with the benefit of having “the great plots of the world explained to me over breakfast” by her communications-tycoon father, cannot detect all the currents before the last night of the Festival, when they converge explosively.

The New York Times hailed André Jute's literary début, Reverse Negative, as “wild but exciting” and the London Evening News thought it “so bizarre, it's probably all true”. In FESTIVAL he brings together his intimate experience of the high-powered performing arts world, his inside knowledge of the security apparats of the world and his abiding love of Adelaide with the terse narrative, pointed dialogue and sharp-focus characterization that elicited such high praise around the world for his writing. The resulting novel lifts the lid off the world's premier arts festival to show the deals that sustain it, the careers it makes and breaks, the men and women of the city itself and from all over the world whose lives are changed by it. FESTIVAL displays all the suspense mounting to a shattering crescendo -- and the astounding twist-in-the-tail -- that is the hallmark of this highly original writer of elegant, credible and truly memorable fiction.