Anita Mason

The War Against Chaos is set in a dystopian version of Britain that is similar in its depiction of a grey, shabby, philistine country, to Orwell's 1984. The principal character Hare, is a clerk for a vast conglomerate known as Universal Goods, who is dismissed from his job and his lodgings after his corrupt boss, Jacobs, manipulates evidence against him.After sleeping rough, Hare is befriended by a community of so-called 'marginals' who live in anarchic communes on the fringes of society. After recuperating, Hare decides to search for his estranged wife, an artist who fled mainstream society after the government closed all art colleges. He encounters another group, known as 'Diggers', who live in abandoned subterranean chambers that were originally intended for use in the event of nuclear war.A group of young Diggers attempt to seize their own plot of land, but the attempt is a failure, and Hare is obliged to lead a group of fleeing 'marginals' and Diggers into 'the Zone', a mysterious patch of land where, it is rumoured, nothing is able to survive.

This novel describes what happened in the culture clash between the Indians of Chiapas and the government of Mexico: the Indians seeking a life and livelihood on their land, the government seeking to repress them and ultimately control their land. The government control is but part and parcel of the new global economy.The Yellow Cathedral comes out of the time the author spent in Mexico in 1994-5, during the Zapatista uprising. Set in the impoverished southern Mexican state of Chiapas in the early 1990s, at the time of the rebellion by the indigenous population and Zapatista activists (the EZLN) against the wealthy landowners and the political establishment.The narrative switches between a number of characters who represents different aspects of the conflict: the indigenous, who may or may not be in sympathy with the revolt, but are in some way on a level with it, and members of the governing class, trying to deal with this revolution and its effects while the economy is spinning out of control.

First published in 1994, this is an incisive analysis of a woman caught up in evil, a viscerally realistic novel about a Nazi test pilot loosely based on the life of Third Reich heroine Hanna Reitsch (1912-1979).Obsessed with flying since childhood, blonde, blue-eyed Frederika Kurtz defies her disapproving physician father and becomes a glider pilot, rising to chief test pilot for Hitler's air force. Boldly making her way in a man's world, Frederika, because of her gender, as well as her exceptional abilities, becomes something of a celebrity, and meets many of the leading figures in the Nazi party, including Hitler and Himmler. He is repelled by the Nazis' brutality, yet captivated by what she perceives as their idealistic commitment to Germany's regeneration. She tests a piloted version of the V-1 rocket and consorts with top Nazi officials, including a general who commits suicide after his tendered resignation is refused.Visiting the Russian front, Frederika witnesses civilian women stripped naked and gassed to death in an SS van. Realizing she has made a pact with the devil, she takes sick leave and becomes an ambulance worker in Germany. Her live-in lesbian love affair with a divorced neighbor ends when the woman, whose Communist father was killed in a Nazi prison camp, walks out, fearful of endangering Frederika. As the novel closes, Frederika, whisked away to Hitler's bunker, watches the Fuhrer and Eva Braun during their final, madness-filled days, then narrowly escapes.

A moral thriller of the first order, The Racket is set in the darkly shadowed Latin American landscape of modern-day Brazil, a vast country on the brink of anarchic lawlessness on every level and bankruptcy both material and spiritual. Against the background of urban decay and the rape of nature, social disintegration, and private despair, two people find themselves at dangerous odds with the institutional savagery around them.One is an idealistic young teacher, Rosa Van Meurs, whose innocently written letter of protest against a corporate violation of native tribal land makes her the target of retribution. The other is her cousin Fabio, a poet and dreamer, who has drifted into the underworld to become an instrument of an evil, with no escape short of death. Inevitably these two opposites are drawn together, their fates intertwined in a tale taut with suspense as it moves toward moments of decision and final reckoning.