A Novel
Each house on Pepys Road, an ordinary street in London, has seen its fair share of first steps and last breaths, and plenty of laughter in between.
But each of the street's residents―a rich banker and his shopaholic wife, a soccer prodigy from Senegal, Pakistani shop owners, a dying old woman and her graffiti-artist son―is receiving a menacing postcard with a simple message: "We Want What You Have." Who is behind this? What do they really want? In Capital, John Lanchester ("an elegant and wonderfully witty writer"―New York Times) delivers a warm and compassionate novel that captures the anxieties of our time―property values going up, fortunes going down, a potential terrorist around every corner―with an unforgettable cast of characters.
"Lanchester [is] a brainy, pleasure-loving polymath [and] reading Capital is like getting a crash course in the transformation of British mores and class distinctions." ―New York Times Book Review
"Full of spectacular comedy―and menace." ―Washington Post
"Perfect fireside reading that captures the Trollopean 'way we live now' without putting on grand airs." ―Vanity Fair
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
John Lanchester was born in Hamburg in 1962. He grew up in the Far East, but was educated in England. A former editor at the publishers Penguin, he is a member of the editorial board of the London Review of Books and is a regular contributor to several newspapers and magazines, including Granta, the New Yorker, The Observer, for whom he was restaurant critic, and the Daily Telegraph, for whom he writes a weekly column.
His first novel, the highly acclaimed The Debt to Pleasure (1996), is the erudite and unorthodox autobiography of sinister gourmet Tarquin Winot. It won the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Betty Trask Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, and an American prize, the Julia Child Award for 'literary food writing'. The novel has been translated into 20 languages. His second book, the ...
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