Brendan Ball: 3 books

Al Horowitz, ageing cartoonist and self-styled ninja, is catapulted from peaceful dotage to national notoriety when a dissident's assassin disguises himself as a benign Horowitz vegetable character, the opening gambit of a plot to cretinise the populace through customised junk food additives and media...

This triptych of stylistically diverse stories - on the unifying theme of the occult, mysticism and primitive religion - features three equally diverse protagonists: a revered tribal chief whose life depends on concealing signs of age, a debonair daemon suffering professional ennui in a staff training...

Two young outsiders - Bron, a jaded musician unworldly and luckless, and Dan, a semi-reformed criminal secretive and haunted - are brought together by a chance encounter and drawn by kinship of character, desperation and music into each other's worlds. Between them on Dan's council estate comes the...