Pierre's debut, Vernon God Little
, won the Man Booker and the Whitbread prizes in 2003; the book narrated a grim and bizarre Columbine-like aftermath in smalltown Texas. Here, Pierre widens his scope in comparing and combining the sordid lives of formerly conjoined twins in the U.K. with that of a seductress from the war-torn Caucasus. The author, whose pen name initials stand for "Dirty But Clean," begins by highlighting the adult Heath twins' childish antics in a terror-threatened London. Upon their medical separation as adults (effected in a prologue; they were conjoined at the abdomen) and release from a private institution, Blair, intrepid and sexually ripe, and Bunny, a feeble asexual, enter the real world and must learn to rely on one another in new ways. Meanwhile, miles away in Ubilisk-Kuzhniskia, the beautiful, sarcastic Ludmila Derev has accidentally killed her incestuous grandfather, the family's sole breadwinner, and must save her family from starvation. Her sharp tongue pulls her into a Russian brides Internet scam, throwing her in the path of the traveling Heath brothers. With a mix of offbeat composition and intoxicating insight, Pierre's dystopian work is in a genus all its own; he succeeds in shocking his audience with this maddeningly entertaining encore. (May 8)
