Books by James Lasdun

A true story of obsessive love turning to obsessive hate, Give Me Everything You Have chronicles the author's strange and harrowing ordeal at the hands of a former student, a self-styled 'verbal terrorist', who began trying, in her words, to 'ruin him'.

James Lasdun's new book of poems, his first since his acclaimed collection Landscape with Chainsaw, applies his characteristic blend of the celebratory and the elegiac to a rich variety of new themes and old obsessions.

Concerned with transformations and dislocations - both physical and emotional - the poems in James Lasdun's second collection speak exquisitely of desire and loss. Jetlagged, estranged, out of synch or out of kilter, the figures in these poems sometimes just miss each other, sometimes connect explosively.

In sharply evoked settings that range from the wilds of Northern Greece to the beaches of Cape Cod, these intensely dramatic tales chart the metamorphoses of their characters as they fall prey to the gamut of human passions.

Part political thriller, part meditation on the nature of desire and betrayal, this book tells the story of Stefan Vogel, a young man growing up in the former East Germany, whose yearnings for love, glory and freedom express themselves in a lifelong fantasy of going to America. It offers an examination of the architecture of deceit.

This excursion into panic and urban paranoia opens with a man losing his place in a book, then deepens into a dark and terrifying story of a man losing his place in the world.