Zed

Zed is having a bad day. She's twelve and there's someone around who's killing kids, which she doesn't have time for. Today, she's already knifed a rapist, traded with half the drunks and addicts in town, talked to the dead, bargained with a sociopath, and extracted crucial information from a mental patient - and she hasn't even left the building. Welcome to what Whitbread Prize winner Lindsay Clarke has called ''a nightmare world which I am trying to escape, but cannot. ''Welcome to the Tower, an urban development project no city wants to lay claim to; a place to steer clear of if at all possible, but if you can't, you'll fit right in. Zed is a vivid, claustrophobic, at times nightmarish novel about madness, survival, and crumbling institutions; it is Moby Dick set in the squalor of an inner city, where rules are abandoned, and it's every man (and young girl) for him or herself. In the spirit of J.G. Ballard's High Rise or Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory, Zed depicts a frenzied underworld; it is a novel of verve and feverish, expansive imagination.