• ISBN 978 0 7206 1 275 2
• Fiction
• Paperback
• 312pp
• £11.95
• Available

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Loving Mephistopheles

Miranda Miller

Jenny is a third-rate music-hall chanteuse living in Edwardian London. When she remarks to her mentor and lover Leo that she never wants to grow old, she is unwittingly making a pact with the Devil. Her contract to love him will reside at the Metaphysical Bank in High Street Kensington. For ever.

Leo has lived through thousands of years in numerous incarnations. As he gleefully exploits what twentieth century London has to offer – as a magician (‘the Great Pantoffsky’), fighter pilot, coke dealer, city banker – Jenny finds that the joy of eternal youth is short-lived. Her unchanging appearance provokes questions and Jenny has to move abroad or constantly reinvent herself. For sixty years she has to pass herself off as her own offspring. When she bears a real daughter that may or may not be Leo’s, his destructive nature comes to the fore. She flees from him and destroys the contract that she has never read. At the same time Leo understands that Jenny is the one woman that he has truly loved and that perhaps it is time the Devil made a stab at family life, whatever the consequences . . .

A compelling journey through twentieth-century Europe and beyond, Miranda Miller’s ingenious take on the Faust story is by turns humorous, erotic and terrifying.

‘A strange mixture here, but strangely beguiling – with echoes of J. K. Rowling and Angela Carter, and guest appearances by the likes of Max Beerbohm and Ezra Pound. We begin in Edwardian London. Jenny is a gutter-bred beauty making a living as a singer in the music halls when she meets the love of her life, the mysterious Leo. Through him, she sells her soul in exchange for eternal youth, and the two proceed to blaze a trail through the history of the 20th century. Great fun – utterly gripping if you just want the story, enormously clever if you appreciate erudition.’ – Times

‘Starts out brilliantly, strides with swagger, an ambitious Faustian romp through vignettes which serve to create a fascinating journey’ – Big Issue

‘ . . . a wonderfully generous novel, several books wrapped into one, and I would have been very happy to stay with any of the strands or in any of the places it takes us to - I was particularly struck by the recreations of Edwardian London and of the London of the modern homeless. It's an epic narrative full of energy, with the wild and joyful inventiveness of an Angela Carter story. It is enjoyable and ingenious, and I hope it will find many readers.’ – Hilary Mantel

‘The legendary pact always allures. I much enjoyed this spirited mingling of familiar wars, poverty, celebrity glitter with unearthly mischief, cynicism and self-transformations . . . Oddly angled history is laced with fantasy now strange, now macabre, surely an imaginative feat of storytelling’ – Peter Vansittart

'A truly remarkable novel, I read it with total fascination.'– John Bayley

‘. . . a brilliantly ambitious novel unlike any other, a London we recognize both lives and breathes amusingly and painfully . . . an absorbing read.’ -– Lyndall Gordon

MIRANDA MILLER was born in London in 1950. After leaving university she moved to Rome, where she combined writing her first novel with a variety of jobs. Later she lived in Japan, Libya and Saudi Arabia. She has published four novels, a book of short stories and a work of non-fiction that examines the effects of homelessness on women.

See Miranda Miller talking about Loving Mephistopheles>

An interview with Miranda Miller at The Book Depository>

http://www.mirandamiller.info/