Showing 1-2 out of 2 reviews.

• Hmmm. Saturday + Week in December. But probably better than both of those. 

  5.00 out of 5

  botogol

• Another marvellous novel, just as one would expect from the author of "Fragrant Harbour" and "The Debt to Pleasure", and very reminiscent of both "A Week in December" by Sebastian Faulks and Tome Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities".The novel starts in late 2007 and revolves around Pepys Street, a small road in south London where house prices, from a modest start over hundred years ago when they were first built, have rocketed to well over a million pounds. The residents are a mixed bunch and include Roger Yount, a merchant banker with Pinker Lloyd, one of the more successful trading houses in the City, his spendthrift wife Arabella, Freddy Kamo, a highly talented seventeen year old footballer who has just been brought over from his native Senegal to play for one of the London Premiership teams at £20,000 per week and Petunia Howe, an elderly widow who was born in the street nearly ninety years ago and has lived there ever since.As the novel opens, Roger Yount is desperate to find out how large his bonus for that year will be - he is hoping for at least one million pounds and, in fact, can't imagine how he will manage to make ends meet with anything less. On his way to the office he finds a card has been puished through hsi letter box bearing a picture of his own pront door with the logo "We want what you have". It turns out that all of his neighbours have received similar cards, each of them bearing a picture of their respective houses. At first they all assume that this is a marketing gimmick by a local estate agency, but the cards keep coming, followed by DVDs showing footage of the street taken at differnet times of the day, but never with anyopne in shot. And then things start to get nasty...In the meantime Zbigniew, a Polish builder, has been making a decent living from the street. His building work is excellent, and always completed on time to a high standard, and as soon as one job finishes he finds another one waiting for him.In fact, everyone seems to be getting on with life very happily until Petunia collapses in the local newsagent's shop, and then everything seems to start to unravel.There are some fantastic set pieces - the scene where Roger goes to hear about his bonus, and Freddy's first appearance in a Premiership match stand out particularly, though there are dozens of other beautifully crafted vignettes. Similarly the characters, including some of the less central figures, are beautifully drawn, including a shadowy anonymous street artist, clearly modelled on Banksy, and Quentina, a Zimbabwean asylum seeker who is illegally employed as a traffic warden.There has been a huge amount of hype surrounding this novel, but to my mind it has fully lived up to expectations. I will definitely look forward to re-reading this book in the not-too-distant future.

  5.00 out of 5

  Eyejaybee

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