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Jane Stevenson is the author of two collections of novellas, Several Deceptions and Good Women, and four novels, London Bridges, Astraea, The Pretender and The Empress of the Last Days. She is a professor in the history department at Aberdeen University and holds the Regius Chair of Humanity.
These four novellas reveal Stevenson as a cruelly funny observer of contemporary mores among today's intelligentsia. Her targets tend either to read or to write for the Spectator, have impeccably good taste in clothes and decor, and a stone where other people have a heart. A house party of university-educated aesthetes is led to indulge in armed robbery as a consequence of their moral indignation at a rich New Yorker's redecoration of a neighbouring house designed by Soane. An Anglo-Italian Professor of semiotics is caught in his own trap as he tries to exploit a temporary secretary for his own ends. An international lawyer takes to terrorism in pursuit of a theory and, in the fourth tale, an Irishwoman turns herself into a Tibetan nun. Seldom has the comedy of ideas been so effectively - and so hilariously - used to reveal the extent and the futility of human vanity. (Kirkus UK)
