Comfort Zone

Comfort Zone
Brian Aldiss

A new novel from one of Britain’s best-loved writer, Brian Aldiss OBE, set in and around his home-town of Oxford.Set in contemporary Oxford, this incisive novel charts the breakdown of a community.A new mosque is to be built – on the site of a derelict pub – and gradually, half-hidden prejudices begin to surface, and relationships between the residents start to sour.Drawing closely on current affairs, this novel investigates what it means to live in a post 7/7 world, where paranoia, prejudice and fear compete with tolerance and diversity.

BRIAN ALDISS

Comfort Zone

A novel of Present Day Discontents

All hands shall be feeble and all knees

shall be weak as water.

They shall also gird themselves with sackcloth,

and horror shall cover them;

and shame shall be on all faces,

and baldness upon all their heads.

– Ezekiel, vii

Table of Contents

Cover (#ue66ebc7e-fa5a-5c55-8e28-b4767390bfd6)

Title Page (#uaf435116-21b1-5e3c-92c1-08e7d20576fd)

Epigraph (#uc0ec01cc-7f5b-5a28-958b-f8d5df8207ed)

1. The Anchor

2. A Note from the Summerhouse

3. Flying Iran Airways

4. Kate Standish Returns

5. The Antiquity of Restaurants

6. Mrs Arrowsmith’s Establishment

7. Types of Rudeness

8. Bumology

9. Baal is Mentioned

10. A Garden Party

11. Headington and Disappointment Street

12. The Secret Shooting

13. Akhram’s Tale

14. A Hint of Eternity

15. Bangalore on the Line

16. Real World Stuff

17. A Funeral for Old Holderness

18. Preparing for the Tropics

19. Another Visit to Eagles Rest

20. Haggard’s She

21. Quetzalcoatl & Co

22. The Meeting at the Village Hall

23. Every Existing Thing Has a Reason

By the same author from The Friday Project

Copyright

About the Publisher

Phantom Intelligences open Thomas Hardy’s drama The Dynasts. The Shade of the Earth interrogates the Spirit of the Years. This is their first exchange.

Shade of the Earth

‘What of the Immanent Will and Its designs?’

Spirit of the Years

‘It works unconsciously, as heretofore,

Eternal artistries in Circumstance,

Whose patterns, wrought by wrapt aesthetic rote,

Seem in themselves Its single listless aim,