Half Moon Street: Two Short Novels

Paul Theroux

Houghton Mifflin, 1984 - American fiction - 219 pages

Doctor Slaughter: The protagonist of Doctor Slaughter, Lauren Slaughter, is a young woman living in near-poverty in London. She has a Ph.D. and works at a research institute. Having already traded sexual favours for help paying the plumber's bills, Lauren easily turns to prostitution to improve her finances. Mysteriously, she receives a video documentary about the Jasmine Escort Agency, a high-priced call-girl service. Feeling herself superior to the women featured on the video, Lauren signs on with the agency. Besides improving her finances, Lauren's second job brings her in contact with the affectionate Lord Bulbeck, a British politician and the mysterious Mr Van Arkady.

Contents

• Section 1: 3
• Section 2: 9
• Section 3: 13

About the author

Paul Edward Theroux was born on April 10, 1941 in Medford, Massachusetts and is an acclaimed travel writer. After attending the University of Massachusetts Amherst he joined the Peace Corps and taught in Malawi from 1963 to 1965. He also taught in Uganda at Makerere University and in Singapore at the University of Singapore. Although Theroux has also written travel books in general and about various modes of transport, his name is synonymous with the literature of train travel. Theroux's 1975 best-seller, The Great Railway Bazaar, takes the reader through Asia, while his second book about train travel, The Old Patagonian Express (1979), describes his trip from Boston to the tip of South America. His third contribution to the railway travel genre, Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China, won the Thomas Cook Prize for best literary travel book in 1989. His literary output also includes novels, books for children, short stories, articles, and poetry. His novels include Picture Palace (1978), which won the Whitbread Award and The Mosquito Coast (1981), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Theroux is a fellow of both the British Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Geographic Society. His title Lower River made The New York Times Best Seller List for 2012. Currently his 2015 book, Deep South, is a bestseller.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Half Moon Street: Two Short Novels
• Author: Paul Theroux
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 1984
• Original from: the University of Michigan
• Digitized: Mar 13, 2008
• ISBN: 0395365112, 9780395365113
• Length: 219 pages