One of fiction''s greatest chancers - the story of Denry Machin and his unceasing, ingenious efforts to become a great manSet in the raw, Victorian world of the ''Five Towns'', The Card tells the extremely funny and tangled story of Denry Machin''s rise from mediocrity to fame through a series of ludicrous and yet perversely successful schemes. He dances, pleads, cheats and inspires his way through life in a series of set-pieces which wonderfully evoke a now long-gone world of civic balls, seaside excursions, newspaper boys and patent chocolate remedies. As everybody said after one of his most stylish coups, Denry ''was not simply a card; he was the card.''