Dr Petworth, a person of no great interest at all, is the practised cultural traveller at the heart of Bradbury's hilarious, witty and surprising novel, set in the capital city of a small eastern European nation known as the bloody battlefield of Europe.

'Malcolm Bradbury is a brilliantly funny writer. There are scenes in Rates of Exchange that must rank among the funniest he has written . . . Petworth's arrival in Slaka is splendidly done - the humiliations of life in transit have seldom been described with such exactness and wit' Evening Standard

'Rates of Exchange is a polished, skilful, stimulating novel that touches, comically though no less thoughtfully for that, on many important themes: language barriers, alienation, East-West relations, realism and reality' Times Literary Supplement