Capital
Pepys Road: an ordinary street in the Capital. Each house has seen its fair share of first steps and last breaths, and plenty of laughter in between. Today, through each letterbox along this ordinary street drops a card with a simple message: We Want What You Have. At forty, Roger Yount is blessed with an expensively groomed wife, two small sons and a powerful job in the City. An annual bonus of a million might seem excessive, but with second homes and nannies to maintain, he's not sure he can get by without it. Elsewhere in the Capital, Zbigniew has come from Warsaw to indulge the super-rich in their interior decoration whims. Freddy Kano, teenage football sensation, has left a two-room shack in Senegal to follow his dream. Traffic warden Quentina has exchanged the violence of the police in Zimbabwe for the violence of the enraged middle classes. For them all, this city offers the chance of a different kind of life. Epic in scope yet intimate, capturing the ordinary dramas of very different lives, this is a novel of love and suspicion, of financial collapse and terrorist threat, of property values going up and fortunes going down, and of a city at a moment of extraordinary tension.
John Lanchester was born in Hamburg in 1962. He was brought up in Asia and educated in England. He is a columnist for the Daily Telegraph and is on the editorial board of the London Review of Books. His novels, The Debt to Pleasure, Mr Phillips and Fragrant Harbour have won several prizes and been translated into more than twenty languages. His memoir, Family Romance, was published in 2007 to great acclaim. He is married and lives in London.
Author: John Lanchester
Format: Hardback, 592 pages, 155mm x 241mm
Published: 2012, Faber & Faber, United Kingdom
Genre: General & Literary Fiction
Pepys Road: an ordinary street in the Capital. Each house has seen its fair share of first steps and last breaths, and plenty of laughter in between. Today, through each letterbox along this ordinary street drops a card with a simple message: We Want What You Have. At forty, Roger Yount is blessed with an expensively groomed wife, two small sons and a powerful job in the City. An annual bonus of a million might seem excessive, but with second homes and nannies to maintain, he's not sure he can get by without it. Elsewhere in the Capital, Zbigniew has come from Warsaw to indulge the super-rich in their interior decoration whims. Freddy Kano, teenage football sensation, has left a two-room shack in Senegal to follow his dream. Traffic warden Quentina has exchanged the violence of the police in Zimbabwe for the violence of the enraged middle classes. For them all, this city offers the chance of a different kind of life. Epic in scope yet intimate, capturing the ordinary dramas of very different lives, this is a novel of love and suspicion, of financial collapse and terrorist threat, of property values going up and fortunes going down, and of a city at a moment of extraordinary tension.
John Lanchester was born in Hamburg in 1962. He was brought up in Asia and educated in England. He is a columnist for the Daily Telegraph and is on the editorial board of the London Review of Books. His novels, The Debt to Pleasure, Mr Phillips and Fragrant Harbour have won several prizes and been translated into more than twenty languages. His memoir, Family Romance, was published in 2007 to great acclaim. He is married and lives in London.