South of the River

Paperback

Condition: Good

Intimate and disconcerting compelling and comic an anatomy of the way things are "South of the River" is the big British novel for our times - and a tour de force. It opens on the 'new dawn' of Labour's election victory in 1997 and ends five years later. But this is not so much 'state of the nation' as state of our souls marriages families hopes and careers - a sharp and sexy portrait of a dysfunctional group of characters all different yet connected. There's Nat failed dramatist and reluctant lecturer falling for a younger woman; Anthea an eco-friendly lost soul obesessed with foxes; Libby hardworking mother and advertising executive the family breadwinner; Harry Nat's friend and ex-pupil a journalist on a local paper with a guilty secret of his own; and Jack Nat's blimpish but unexpectedly poignant uncle who lives for fox-hunting and runs a failing engineering company in East Anglia. Beneath the bright familiar world of Blair's Britain there's a dark undertow of political and personal disillusion of mythologies and urban myths that circle round our apparently comfortable lives. "South of the River" a tale of five people two rivers and many Englands metropolitan and rural black and white is gloriously readable and brimming with art and life.