London and the South-East

August 28, 2017
This bleak, devastatingly observant novel from the Booker Prize finalist follows English ad salesman Paul Rainey. Stuck on an underperforming team at a dead-end sales firm, Paul is thrown a life raft by a former colleague, Eddy, who promises him a position at his own thriving sales company in exchange for a betrayal of Paul’s current one. Paul goes to painstaking, embarrassing lengths to orchestrate this betrayal, recruiting his fellow salespeople to jump ship with him to Eddy’s firm, but the plan backfires spectacularly on Paul, costing him his job, friends, and purpose. After he fails to secure employment as a gardener and then as a street sweeper, Paul’s wife, Heather, finds him a job stocking shelves overnight at a supermarket. What minor confidence boost this affords Paul is swiftly eradicated by another betrayal, leading Paul to devise a revenge plan so ill-conceived that it circles around to profound. Written with intense psychological acuity and inventive detail, the author turns a humdrum account of male malaise into an experience far more affecting—and universal—than it has any right to be.

October 15, 2017

Paul Rainey and his fellow salesmen spend their days on the phone, playing fast and loose with the truth, exhorting potential clients to purchase ad space in industrial magazines. Yet they spend far more time schmoozing in the smoke room and boozing it up in the pubs and bars around their London offices. Between his long commutes to the outer burbs and his inevitable hangovers, Paul's family time is brief and largely unconscious. He is also burned out at work. So when a former colleague offers him a position in a bigger and better ad agency, Paul accepts, even though this means stabbing his closest friend in the back and fatally wounding his own firm. But nothing is as it first appears, and the double-crossing is just beginning. VERDICT Watch for many twists and turns in this fiendishly plotted page-turner, the first novel, finally issued here, by the author of the Man Booker short-listed All That Man Is. [See Prepub Alert, 4/10/17.]--Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.

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