Stephen Vizinczey - An Innocent Millionaire

First published in 1983, An Innocent Millionaire tells the story of Mark Niven, the son of an American actor who makes an uncertain living in Europe. "Mankind, we are told, is divided into the haves and the havenots, but there are those who both have the goods and do not and they live the tensest lives." The boy who spends his childhood in various countries "has no emotional address" and once financial pressures led to the divorce of his parents, he becomes enchanted with the idea of finding a Spanish treasure ship. He finds both love and the treasure ship, but the fortune turns into a nightmare and his happiness with a married woman ends in tragedy.

The novel was praised by critics including Graham Greene and Anthony Burgess. Burgess wrote in Punch, that Vizinczey could "teach the English how to write English", praised the novel's "prose style and its sly apophthegms, as well as in the solidity of its characters, good and detestable alike." Burgess ended his review by saying, "I was entertained but also deeply moved: here is a novel set bang in the middle of our corrupt world that, in some curious way, breathes a kind of desperate hope." The London Literary Review called the novel "an authentic social epic, which reunites, after an estrangement of nearly a century, intellectual and moral edification with exuberant entertainment."