Riotous Assembly.

This is a first edition of the book that solidified Tom Sharpe's reputation. Written ten years after Sharpe was arrested for sedition and deported from South Africa, this scathing ridicule of apartheid and its enforcers was riotously popular. Its satirical approach, Piers Brendon argued in a contemporary review, achieved far more than 'the polemical pleading or passionate abuse to which [the South African government and police] are normally subjected'. Sharpe's bumbling policemen, unqualified and overwhelmed, encounter murder by elephant gun, miscegenation, transvestism, and rubber fetishism, ending in pandemonium.

Tom Sharpe, raised in England by a Nazi-sympathising father and a South African mother, was, as a youth, susceptible to his father's harangues, but after realising the horrors caused by fascism, spent his life resisting anything he saw as 'patriarchal power'. This was the first of two South African novels taking place in the fictional town of Piemburg. Sharpe is also well known for the hilarious satire of his alma mater, Cambridge University, Porterhouse Blue, published three years after this edition. Sharpe's novels takes their rightful place among the tradition of great British satirical writing, alongside Evelyn Waugh and P. G. Wodehouse.

First edition; 8vo; incredibly minimal spotting, an ownership inscription in thick pen to front free endpaper, but otherwise a very clean copy; publisher's blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt a very good copy with uncut dust jacket with fading on spine panel, lightly rubbed edges; [vi], 249pp.