London life just after World War I, devoid of values and moving headlong into chaos at breakneck speed — Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay, like Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, portrays a world of lost souls madly pursuing both pleasure and meaning. Fake artists, third-rate poets, pompous critics, pseudo-scientists, con-men, bewildered romantics, cock-eyed futurists — all inhabit this world spinning out of control, as wildly comic as it is disturbingly accurate. In a style that ranges from the lyrical to the absurd, and with characters whose identities shift and change as often as their names and appearances, Huxley has here invented a novel that bristles with life and energy, what the New York Times called a delirium of sense enjoyment!

Far in the future, the World Controllers have created the ideal society. Through the clever mix of genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational sex and drugs, everyone is a happy consumer. Bernard Marx seems alone in his discontent.

In 1634 Urbain Grandier, a handsome and successful seducer of women and priest of the parish of Loudun, was tried, tortured and burnt at the stake. He had been found guilty of being in league with the devil and seducing an entire convent of nuns in what was the most sensational case of mass possession and sexual hysteria in history. Grandier maintained his innocence to the end and four years after his death the nuns were still being subjected to exorcisms to free them from their demonic bondage. Huxley's vivid account of this bizarre tale of religious and sexual obsession transforms our understanding of the medieval world.

The dilettantes who frequent Lady Tantamount's society parties are determined to push forward the moral frontiers of the age. Marjorie has left her family to live with Walter; Walter is in love with the luscious but cold-hearted Lucy who devours every man in sight; the repulsive Spandrell deflowers young girls for the sake of entertainment and all the while everyone is engaged in dazzling and witty conversation. Often described as a Vanity Fair for the Twenties, Point Counter Point contains wickedly accurate portraits of D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Ottoline Morrell and Huxley himself.

Denis Stone, a naive young poet, is invited to stay at Crome, a country house renowned for its gatherings of 'bright young things'. Crome's hosts, the world-weary Henry Wimbush and his exotic wife Pricilla are joined by a party of colourful guests whose intrigues and opinions ensure Denis' stay is a memorable one. In the course of the weekend Henry tells his guests fantastical stories from the history of the house, Mr. Barbeque-Smith invents inspirational aphorisms conceived in trances, Mary dispenses with her virginity on the roof, the local vicar prophesies the Apocolypes, the annual Crome Fair takes place and Denis tries to capture it all in poetry and has his heart broken.