PETTY VENIZ

THE SOMETIME EMBARRASSMENTS 

OF 

PETTY VENIZ

by 

Martin Harrington

A vision, a peculiar international movement flooding the city, an Empress, and a strange artefact called the Chimaera… Petty Veniz will never be the same again, for it seems the Apocalypse is at hand.

It is the bizarre culmination of a series of events which began a year or two before, when the ‘The Most Ancient and Venerable University of St Mark the Evangelist, commonly known as Petty Veniz’, found that it is not, as it had thought, securely wealthy: it is, in fact, insolvent. When the university’s head, a hitherto unassuming academic called Bill Westey, announces that he has experienced a vision, the world of the University is turned upside down, culminating in the arrival of the Empress, who controls the Chimaera.

The Professor of Moral Philosophy, Jim Gentry, infatuated with one of his doctoral students, becomes convinced that his mental disturbance is the cause of the city’s crisis. Fifty years after Gentry’s death, his younger contemporary Moses Mandeville receives a copy of the journal Gentry kept at that time. It is the incentive that the now aged Mandeville needs, to complete his account of the ‘sometime embarrassments’ of Petty Veniz.

A brilliant, unique book: gripping, satirical and thought-provoking, set in an alternative world which yet somehow is our own.