Alexander Stuart: The War Zone: 20th Anniversary Edition

The film went on to screen at the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Sydney International Film Festival and to première in Britain at the Edinburgh Film Festival. It was also shown at the Toronto, Melbourne and Jerusalem Film Festivals, among others.

Tim Roth’s movie of The War Zone was scripted by Alexander Stuart from his novel. The film stars Ray Winstone, Tilda Swinton, Lara Belmont and Freddie Cunliffe, and is available on DVD.

Visit the Internet Movie Database web page for The War Zone for more details.

“A film of haunting power” – Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“A superior, brooding family drama worthy of Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams” – Daily Variety

“Two thumbs up! A great movie. Tim Roth takes a story filled with hazards and tells it triumphantly” – Roger Ebert & The Movies

“Fueled by a quartet of stunning performances and a remarkably lean script by Alexander Stuart (based on his novel), The War Zone is one of the year’s best films – but it’s definitely not one for the faint of heart” – Time Out New York

Official Selection:

• Sundance Film Festival

• Cannes Film Festival

• Berlin Film Festival

Alexander Stuart (also known as Alexander Chow-Stuart) is a Los Angeles-based, British-born novelist and screenwriter, whose novels, non-fiction and children’s books have been translated into eight languages and published in the US, Britain, Europe and throughout the world.

His most controversial novel, The War Zone , about a family torn apart by incest, was turned into a searingly emotional film by Oscar-nominated actor/director Tim Roth. At the time of the book’s initial publication, it was stripped of the Whitbread Best Novel Award amid controversy among the panel of three judges.

Stuart’s books include Life On Mars, his non-fiction account of his life in Miami Beach in the 1990s, which formed the basis of his Channel Four television documentary, The End of America.

As a screenwriter, Stuart has worked with actors ranging from Angelina Jolie to Jodie Foster, and with directors including Tim Roth, Danny Boyle and Jonathan Glazer.

Stuart lives in California with his wife, Charong Chow, their two young children and a growing menagerie of pets.

www.alexanderstuart.com

“Stunning… mysterious and deeply moving.”

“This is a pungent shocking book, superbly written (sharp, sensuous, bitter), which… presents the theme of incest not as a device of sexual titillation but as a symbol of social breakdown. I was horrified but seduced from first to last. The writing is remarkable.”

“From the novel’s first scene, the material is explosive. Mr. Stuart has written screenplays… the film training serves him well here, both in the novel’s skilled pacing and in the cinematic precision of the description. His Devon, ‘full of premeditated, parceled country charm,’ makes an ideal setting for this story. During a fight between Tom and his father in the backyard, Tom observes ‘the wrecked barbecue and the smashed table on the lawn like a still life in some crisp, arty photograph.’ Mr. Stuart often stops to linger on such images; they help to make The War Zone memorable.”

“Alexander Stuart’s The War Zone does for Britain now something of what Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange did a quarter of a century ago. It is several steps further into the nightmare… The emblematic shock in Orange was its gratuitous violence. In The War Zone , it is incest.”

“ The Catcher in the Rye of the 90s.”

“Incest may not be a subject with which to conquer the hearts and minds of an entire panel of Whitbread judges, but in Alexander Stuart’s The War Zone it becomes the focus of acute, tense writing. This novel is neither voyeuristic nor ‘repellent’, but a tightly drawn, savagely seductive portrayal of adolescent anger and social disorder. In the tension it creates between sensuality and disgust, words are spat and purred by turn, and love and hatred are just opposite sides of the same foreign coin.

For Tom, the bitter-sour adolescent narrator, a sexual relationship between his father and elder sister is just one facet of a world twisted sideways, snarled up in knots. His language, sometimes raw, sometimes swollen with self-indulgence, tangles images of nature with sexual corruption: the sky blood red where it touches the backbone of the houses. His anger besmears even the bits of life he loves. This is a disturbing, claustrophobic book, fraught with obsession and fantasies.”

“Pulled into Stuart’s perverse and smoldering landscape, the reader does not so much read this book as become its prisoner.”

The War Zone (published screenplay)

Tribes

Glory B.

Life On Mars

Five And A Half Times Three (with Ann Totterdell)

Henry and the Sea (with Joe Buffalo Stuart)

Joe, Jo-Jo and the Monkey Masks

AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: 1-800-839-8640

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

© Alexander Stuart 1989, 1999, 2009 All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 7/27/2009

ISBN: 978-1-4389-9117-7 (sc)

Newly Revised 20 thAnniversary Edition and Introduction Copyright © Alexander Stuart 2009

Afterword copyright © Tim Roth 1999

The War Zone Diary copyright © Alexander Stuart 1999, 2009

Published in association with Yellow Giraffe Pictures, Inc

Originally published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton Ltd.

Originally published in the United States by Doubleday.

ENGLISH LANGUAGE PRINTING HISTORY

Hamish Hamilton edition published 1989

Doubleday edition published 1989

Bantam Trade edition published 1990

Vintage edition published 1990

Black Swan edition published 1998

Black Swan edition reissued 1999

AuthorHouse 20 thAnniversary edition published 2009

Printed in the United States of America Bloomington, Indiana

This book is printed on acid-free paper.