WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY US ASTRONAUT SCOTT KELLY

‘What is it,’ asks Tom Wolfe, ‘that makes a man willing to sit on top of an enormous Roman Candle?and wait for someone to light the fuse?’ Arrogance? Stupidity? Courage? Or, simply, that quality we call ‘the right stuff’?

A monument to the men who battled to beat the Russians into space, The Right Stuff is a voyage into the mythology of the American space programme, and a dizzying dive into the sweat, fear, beauty and danger of being on the white-hot edge of history in the making.

‘Tom Wolfe at his very best? Learned, cheeky, risky, touching, tough, compassionate, nostalgic, worshipful, jingoistic…The Right Stuff is superb’ New York Times Book Review

Sherman McCoy is a WASP, bond trader and self-appointed ‘Master of the Universe’. He has a fashionable wife, a Park Avenue apartment and a Southern mistress. His spectacular fall begins the moment he is involved in a hit-and-run accident in the Bronx. Prosecutors, newspaper hacks, politicians and clergy close in on him, determined to bring him down.

Exuberant, scandalous and exceptionally discerning, The Bonfire of the Vanities was Tom Wolfe’s first venture into fiction and cemented his reputation as the foremost chronicler of his age.

‘The air of New York crackles with an energy that causes the adrenalin to pump? The feeling is perfectly reproduced in Wolfe’s novel? Electric’ – Sunday Times

‘The quintessential novel of The Eighties’ – The Guardian