ARCHER, Jeffrey. Kane & Abel. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2012.

Octavo. Full deep brown leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. [Pagination to be confirmed.] Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the special signature page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1979.

Jeffrey Archer (b. 1940) — Baron Archer of Weston-super-Mare — is among the most commercially successful novelists of the past half century, published in 114 countries and 47 languages, with international sales exceeding 275 million copies. He is also among its more colourful figures: a Conservative Member of Parliament whose political career ended in tabloid scandal, Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party, a life peer, and a man who in 2001 was convicted of perjury and perverting the course of justice and sentenced to four years' imprisonment, of which he served two. He subsequently published three volumes of prison diary. None of this has perceptibly diminished his readership.

Kane & Abel, first published in 1979, is the novel on which his reputation rests and by which he is most widely known. Two men are born on the same day in 1906 on opposite sides of the world: William Lowell Kane, in Boston, into an established family of considerable wealth; Abel Rosnovski, in a small village in what is now Poland, into poverty so absolute that his first years are shaped entirely by the struggle for survival. Both men are brilliant, both are ruthless, and both are consumed by ambition. Fate — through war, immigration, the Depression, the construction of business empires, and a chain of personal wrongs and misunderstandings — brings them into collision, and the novel follows their sixty-year struggle across three generations with the pace and readability that have kept it in print continuously since publication.

Kane & Abel is among the top 100 best-selling books in the world, with a comparable number of copies sold to To Kill a Mockingbird and Gone with the Wind. The BBC Big Read ranked it 96th among the greatest books ever written in 2003. It was adapted into a television miniseries in 1985, starring Peter Strauss as Abel and Sam Neill as William Kane, which further expanded the novel's already enormous audience. It is straightforwardly and unapologetically popular fiction of the highest order — a novel designed to be read at speed, in large quantities, by the largest possible number of people, and it delivers on every one of those ambitions. 

Near fine. Some very faint markings along gilt edges; otherwise fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000525