Pepys Road: an ordinary street in the Capital. Each house has seen a hundred years of fortunes made and lost, of hearts broken, of first steps and last breaths. One day in early December 2007, a card with a simple message drops through each letterbox: We Want What You Have. At forty, Roger Yount is blessed with an expensive life, a stalled marriage and a job in the City. His hoped-for Christmas bonus of a million pounds might seem lavish, but with second homes and nannies to maintain, it's starting to look more like a necessity. Smitty, bad-boy provocateur of the art world, is maintaining the delicate balance of success and anonymity. Sipping a triple-shot cappuccino in his Shoreditch workshop, he considers his next site-specific conceptual piece, 'Bloody Great Hole'. Elsewhere in the capital, Zbigniew has come from Warsaw to indulge the affluent in their interior decoration whims.
"Precise, humane and often hilarious, John Lanchester's Capital""teems with life. Its Dickensian sweep and its clear-eyed portrayal of the end of a strange era make this novel not only immensely enjoyable, but important, too."
--Claire Messud
"Strikingly original..."
--"The Guardian"
"Lanchester makes us care deeply about his imperiled characters....A remarkably vibrant and engrossing novel about what we truly value."
--"Booklist"
"Capital""[is] filled with the news of now, in which the intricacies of the present moment are noticed with clarity and relish and then brilliantly dramatized. It is clear that its characters, its wisdom, and the scope and range of its sympathy, will fascinate readers into the far future."
--Colm Toibin
Shortlisted for Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize 2012.
Title: Capital
Subtitle:
Contributors:
By (author)
John Lanchester
ISBN 13: 9780571234608
ISBN 10: 0571234607
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Imprint: Faber and Faber
Publication Date: 20/04/2012
Place of Publication:
London,
United Kingdom
Edition:
BIC Subjects:
Modern fiction
NBS Classification: General & Literary Fiction
Dewey Classification:
823.92
(DC23)
Format: Hardback
Pages: 592
Height: 240mm
Width: 161mm
Thickness: 40mm
Weight: 902g