Description

In the best selling writer of Your Debt to Pleasure, a significant cultural novel set in the peak of the monetary crisis.Celebrated novelist John Lanchester (“a stylish and incredibly amusing writer”—New York Times) results by having an impressive novel that reflects the obsessions of our period. It’s 2008 and things are falling apart: Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers are going under, and the citizens of Pepys Road, London—a bank and his shopaholic wife, a classic lady dying of a brain cancer and her graffiti-artist son, Pakistani shop-owners and a shadowy refugee who functions whilst the meter maid, the small football superstar from Senegal and his minder—are receiving unknown postcards studying “We Need That Which You Have.” Who is behind it? What do they need? Impressive in scope yet intimate, taking the standard dramas of different lifestyles, this can be a book of love and mistrust, of monetary failure and terrorist risk, of home prices going up and prospects going along, and of the town in a time of incredible pressure.