The Family Arsenal is a darkly comic novel of warped morals and disillusionment in South London by the award-winning writer Paul Theroux. In South London terrorists plot...Hood, a renegade American diplomat, envisions a new urban order in the opium for of his room. He flirts with terrorists, hoping to win their trust and respect. Mayo, his sometime bedmate, has just made a political statement - stealing a Flemish painting and negotiating publicity over this act with The Times . Murf the bomb-maker leaves his mark in red, scrawling 'Arsenal Rule' across half the city's walls, whilst his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Brodie, bombs Euston and afterwards worries about her complexion. A novel of London lowlife and the dispossessed, and a powerful and violent thriller of disenchanted people. A pleasure ...with Theroux the thrills are never cheap and obvious . ( Guardian ). One of the most evocative, intelligently crafted suspense novels in years - like the early fiction of Graham Greene...London has rarely looked dingier or more sinister ...an assured success . ( The New York Times ). Brilliant and haunting ...the ingenious of the plot, the London setting ...the trapped and interwoven people, and the balefully witty observation, have an undistracted force . ( Observer ). American travel writer Paul Theroux is known for the rich descriptions of people and places that is often streaked with his distinctive sense of irony; his novels and collected short stories, My Other Life , The Collected Stories , My Secret History , The Lower River , The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro , A Dead Hand , Millroy the Magician , The Elephanta Suite , Saint Jack , The Consul's File , The Mosquito Coast , and his works of non-fiction, including the iconic The Great Railway Bazaar are available from Penguin.