The informers

Now a major film starring Mickey Rourke, Winona Ryder, Kim Basinger and Billy Bob Thornton Capturing the lives of a group of people in Los Angeles, The Informers is an intense narrative that blurs genders, generations and even identities.

The characters go to the same schools and eat at the same restaurants.

Their voices enfold us as seamlessly as those of DJs heard over a car radio.

They have sex with the same boys and girls and buy from the same dealers.

In short, they are connected in the only way people can be in L.A. - suffering from nothing less than the death of the soul. `The Informers is spare, austere, elegantly designed, telling in details, coolly ferocious, sardonic in its humour, every vestige of authorial sentiment is expunged' New York Times `A well-observed and bleakly funny indictment of a culture with money, cars and drugs, where the nearest things to spiritual values are health food and good looks' Times Literary Supplement `Ellis has the ability to capture modern reality with the ferocity of a collector driving a pin through a social butterfly' Guardian