The Wanting Seed is an inventive, thought-provoking and darkly absurd novel set in a work rampant with overpopulation.

As governments struggle to maintain order in the face of overpopulation and food shortages and homosexuality is glorified in an attempt to further limit family sizes, Tristram Foxe and his wife Beatrice-Joanna find themselves facing dire choices. Their world transforms into a chaos of cannibalistic dining-clubs, fantastic fertility rituals, and wars without anger.

“Burgess is unfailingly inventive and apposite; a protean stylist, specialist in English sound-changes and rare words, polymath, antiquarian, a bit of Joyce even. But he bears it all lightly, and this is both a serious novel and unusually engaging.”– New Statesman

“A remarkable and brilliantly imaginative novel, vital and inventive…..‘The whole thing is wildly and fantastically funny, for all the bitter after-taste of many incidents.” – Walter Keir, Times Literary Supplement.