Richard Mason
reads from his new novel History of a Pleasure Seeker (Knopf, $25.95).
From Amsterdam at the turn of the last century to New York at the time of the 1907 financial crisis, the novel proceeds onboard a luxury liner headed for Cape Town, following the adventures of a young Dutchman, Piet Barol.
Piet applies for a job as tutor to the troubled son of Europe’s leading hotelier: a child who refuses to leave his family’s mansion on Amsterdam’s grandest canal. As the young man enters this glittering world, he learns its secrets—and soon, quietly, steadily, finds his life transformed as he in turn transforms the lives of those around him.
History of a Pleasure Seeker is a brilliantly written portrait of the senses, a novel about pleasure and those who are in search of it; those who embrace it, luxuriate in it, need it; and those who deprive themselves of it as they do those they love. It is a book that beguiles and transports—to another world, another time, another state of being.
Richard Mason was born in South Africa in 1978 and lives in New York City. His first novel, The Drowning People, published when he was twenty-one and still a student at Oxford, sold more than a million copies worldwide and won Italy’s Grinzane Cavour Prize for Best First Novel. He is also the author of Natural Elements, chosen by the Washington Post as one of the best books of 2009.
In 1999, with Nobel Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mason started the Kay Mason Foundation (www.kaymasonfoundation.org), which helps disadvantaged South Africans access quality education. He is the recipient of the Inyathelo Award for Philanthropy.
