From the acclaimed author of the dystopian classic A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed is an inventive, thought-provoking and darkly absurd novel set in a work rampant with overpopulation.

The Wanting Seed is part of our Penguin Essentials series which spotlights the very best of our modern classics.

As governments struggle to maintain order in the face of overpopulation and food shortages and homosexuality is glorified in an attempt to further limit family sizes, Tristram Foxe and his wife Beatrice-Joanna find themselves facing dire choices. Their world transforms into a chaos of cannibalistic dining-clubs, fantastic fertility rituals, and wars without anger.

Wildly and fantastically funny . . . A remarkable and brilliantly imagined novel, vital and inventive * TLS *

Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) is the author of many works, including A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed, Nothing Like the Sun, and Re Joyce.