'This book seems to be about us. Within a day or two of starting it I devised a title: VAC... The subtle idea was to fuse the suggestion of holiday or vacation with that of vacuum...'

Paul Ableman's third novel, first published in 1968, is - through the voice of its narrator Billy Soodernim, libidinous and regretful by turns - a meditation on love and carnality, monogamy and promiscuity, childbirth, separation and indeed the whole of the fraught relations between the sexes: 'male and female, citizens with distinct personalities, flesh inwraught in flesh.'

'Paul Ableman's novels were praised for their inventive language, bawdy high spirits, and originality of form by Anthony Burgess, Philip Toynbee, Robert Nye and other friends of the avant-garde. They are witty, original, and full of good humour, and I am delighted Faber Finds are reissuing them.' Margaret Drabble

About the Author
Paul Ableman (1927-2006) was a novelist, playwright and screenwriter, born in Leeds and brought up in London and New York. He was the author of five novels, most famous of which was I Hear Voices, in which his writing is inspired not only by the modernist avant garde but by psychoanalytic theory. He also wrote plays and scripts for radio, television and theatre. He was chief fiction reviewer for the Spectator and the Evening Standard, and London literary correspondent for the Australia Broadcasting Corporation. Margaret Drabble, born in 1939, is a novelist, critic and biographer. Her novels include The Millstone (winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Jerusalem the Golden (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) and The Needle's Eye. She has written biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson, and is the editor of the fifth and sixth editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature. She was made a Dame of the British Empire in 2008.


Book Information
ISBN 9780571314843
Author Paul Ableman
Format Paperback
Page Count 158
Imprint Faber & Faber
Publisher Faber & Faber
Weight(grams) 186g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 126mm * 11mm