..first published in 1987
"It's about a sailor gets shipwrecked, falls in with a bunch of pirates, and joins a quest to steal a fantastic treasure from a haunted island guarded by a monster."
p.s.
“Phlebas is the drowned Phoenician sailor in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land which is my favourite poem, if you exclude Shakespeare. Not that I like what Eliot stood for, but he was a genius and The Waste Land is his masterpiece. Well, his and Pound’s, also of iffy political leanings. I just always like the words, ‘Consider Phlebas’. They looked good, they sounded good. They just looked like a title somehow. I tried all sorts of titles for the story before I settled on Consider Phlebas, but they all sounded too much like Star Wars. I knew it was a weird title but I thought well, if it works it’ll just become right for the book.”
-IMB