Tornado Pratt is the last of the old-style American tycoons who has lived his life with ferocious vigour through the vacillating fortunes of twentieth-century America. The novel finds him in a hotel room at the end of his days, as he recounts in a dying monologue the events of his turbulent life. What is revealed, in an account full of jokes and surprises, is a brash, lustful, comic, profane, naive and sentimental man who, driven on by remorse, displays a wry and perceptive honesty about himself, even as his memories begin to merge with imaginings. Often funny and sometimes moving, Tornado Pratt's voice is an unforgettable one in which he confronts his own mortality, and in which Paul Ableman gives us an astonishing, affecting and life-affirming story. Auberon Waugh called Tornado Pratt 'a magnificent and memorable novel'.
