Excerpt from High Dive by Jonathan Lee, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Truth was, Moose hadn't had sex in a while. The one great difficulty of his job was the fact of being surrounded, at all times, by people engaged in sexual communion. Guests were having sex against walls and on hushed carpets, in storage cupboards and on sea-view balconies, in gooseneck freestanding baths and walk-in showers and probably just occasionally on beds. Forty-five. Too young, definitely, to have taken retirement from romance. But it was more of a redundancy-type situation, wasn't it? A severance. Lust running on without opportunity, not unlike a headless chicken. People still occasionally made remarks about his appearance—remarks interpretable as compliments—but he was often too busy to follow up on such leads. He'd had only a handful of flings with women in the years since Viv had left him for a guy called Bob; Freya at that time was thirteen. Possibly he'd have to relax his no-guest rule. There was always someone lonelier than you were. He struggled sometimes to shake the idea that his early life had been all about an excess of sex and a sense of bottled potential and that these things had, in the rich tradition of life's droll jokes, been replaced by an absence of sex and a sense of wasted potential.

"New skirt," he said.

"No."

"New haircut, though."

"We've covered this," she said.

He flicked the indicator. Reminded himself to waterproof the passenger window. Masking tape before autumn really kicked in. They passed a Labrador walking a lightweight woman.

Frey mumbled something.

"You've become a mumbler," he said.

"Wendy told me to tell you hello."

"Did she? That's nice. How was she then? Still dying?"

"Yeah. Bit more each time."

"Good hair though."

"Hmm."

"I bumped into her in Woolworth's a few weeks back. Forgot to say. Complained to me about an ingrowing toenail. I thought it might mark a new move into realism."

"No," Freya said. "There was no mention of toes. She was back to brain tumors and surgeries."

"Shame."

They rolled on through Brighton's breezy, straight, and safe-looking streets, lamp posts spaced out and rooflines designed to rhyme. Girls in white denim walking, ponytails flicking. Women in smart dark jackets, narrow at the waist and wide at the shoulders. Crazy baggy T-shirts giving gangly kids space to hide. The summer not yet over. That special summer hum. The Prime Minister was coming to stay in a few weeks' time. He knew her visit was a route to promotion. To future GM opportunities in Oxford or Bristol or Durham, wherever Freya ended up studying. Money, too. His current £14,000 a year didn't go that far. He needed to provide and provide. He'd earn more as a doorman or a bellman—those guys built houses out of one-pound coins—but if you were a doorman or a bellman you were a doorman or a bellman for life, addicted to tips and shorn of the chance to advance; he'd seen it happen many times. A salaried position had a future. That was the idea, anyway.

Left onto the King's Road, a modest milk float trundling past them. On his right, the vast glittering sweep of the sea. Late-season holidaymakers, towels slung over their shoulders, crossed the street to reach a warm swerve of shore. Gray stones and beige stones, some slick and some dry. The British approach to sunburn was simple: get out there and upgrade yesterday's patchy burns into something of more uniform severity. The recklessness of his own heat-seeking people made Moose oddly proud. Paint was peeling from the candyfloss huts, faded seaside glamour.

The Grand came into view, one of the loves of his life, a giant white wedding cake of a building facing out onto the English Channel. The wide eaves, the cornices, the elaborate brick enrichments. The Union Jack slapping high. He loved the twiddly little features and their special arcane names. One hundred and twenty years of stinging drizzle, of corrosive sunshine, of the salty gales and acidic bird shit that is every coastal town's cross to bear.

Excerpted from High Dive by Jonathan Lee. Copyright © 2016 by Jonathan Lee. Excerpted by permission of Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.