First Impressions

This week's First Impressions, the competition in which you have to identify a book from its opening sentence, comes from a novelist of unseasonal greetings:

"Though Bateman was prepared from experience to suffer the rigmarole and the chastisement necessary to land another job, he still needed to suck courage from a Player's Medium before he could enter the Margaret Mead Bureau."

Entries to First Impressions, The THES, Admiral House, 66-68 East Smithfield, London E1 9XY, faxed to 0171-782 3000 or emailed to theschat@thes.co.uk The winner receives a Pounds 20 book token and the closing date is December 31. The winner of last week's competition, who identified Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life: the Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, is Chris Barrow of Swansea.