Renegade or Halo2

First edition. Large 8vo. 478pp. Blue cloth boards lettered in gilt to spine. Pictorial dustwrapper (priced at £17.99 to front flap).

Signed by the Author to the title page. A rare copy, so.

Author's sixth novel. Winner of the 1999 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction). In flight from a framed rape and murder charge, Sugar Rey Castro, a black Amerasian street kid in the Philippines, joins the global migrant underclass who labour in semi-slavery. While winning praise, the book split that year's Booker judges, with the women refusing to countenance it on the shortlist, not least for its graphic rape-murder scene.

In a Guardian interview, Mo defended the scene as a "regular occurrence, where rich sons of powerful people get together and rape, often murder, a poor girl; it's not just my warped imagination. I'm interested in moral dilemmas: the cultural imperative is you stick by your group, which Rey does but is haunted by it; [the girl's] ghost haunts the novel".

Increasingly mistrustful and outspoken about the publishing industry, Mo rejected substantial advances from publishers in the early 1990s and now self-publishes under his own label "Paddleless Press". "Homeric in its scope... Mo works wonders." –Michael Mellor, Observer