Book description
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. Capital is a
post-crash state-of-the nation novel told with compassion and humour,
featuring a cast of characters that you will be sad to leave behind.
John Lanchester's 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.
