<p><b>**SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2020**</b><br><br><b>Two timely novellas exploring male sexual violence, power and corruption</b><br><br><b>¿<i>Victory</i> makes a convincing case for James Lasdun as one of the most incisive investigators of the human heart writing in English today¿ An instant masterpiece¿ Johanna Thomas-Corr, <i>Observer</i><br></b><br>Love and hate, desire and guilt, friendship and betrayal ¿ these are the coordinates that drive James Lasdun¿s two intensely gripping, darkly comic novellas of men and women caught between their irrational passions and the urge for control. <br><br>In <i>Feathered Glory</i> the seemingly happy marriage of a school principal and his artist wife reveals dangerous fault-lines as an old lover reappears in the husband¿s life. The past also haunts the present in <i>Afternoon of a Faun</i>, where an accusation of historic sexual assault plunges Marco Rosedale, an English journalist in New York, into a series of deepening cris