James Norbury leaves his sister in the Yorkshire mansion that was his childhood home to make out for London, in search of a readership for his gloomy and laboured poetry. Before long, he is rapidly running out of money, and so accepts the offer of a room from an old university acquaintance and finds his life much improved. Moving in different social circles and inspired by love and an Oscar Wilde play, he decides to become a playwright and spends a good few months living […]

Holly Sykes fills this book. Bookmarking the beginning and end with first-person narration, we experience her life as a fifteen year-old runaway and as a grandmother trying to protect her children in a world falling apart at the seams. But in the intervening years we catch glimpses of her from the perspectives of a cast of acquaintances, lovers and friends such as the Bret Easton Ellis-esque sociopathic monster that is Hugo Lamb, a twenty-something egotistical conman intent on scoring against his rich Cambridge cohorts; the […]