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The story of one day in the life of a decent man who only forty-eight hours before knew exactly who and what he was and who on this day wonders who and what he can become.
Mr Phillips wakes on the morning of July 31 in his modest, nearly mortgage-free home, in the bed he has contentedly shared with his wife of thirty years (though to be honest, at night he lies beside her and dreams of other women), ready to face another ordinary day. Except that for Mr Phillips, it is not an ordinary day, for on Friday, July 28, he was summarily sacked. Nonetheless, he rises at his usual hour and prepares himself as he has done his entire working life for the office he no longer has.
This is the story of one day in the life of a decent man who only forty-eight hours before knew exactly who and what he was--husband and father, accountant, home-owner, son--and who on this day wonders who and what he can become.
With his eye for the telling detail, his ear for the commonplaces of speech that make us who we are, his sympathy for the very ordinariness that sets us each apart, John Lanchester has created a jewel of a novel: From common clay, he has given us gold.
He has been called "a writer whose gifts border on the demonic" (Michael Upchurch, Chicago Tribune), and his first novel, The Debt to Pleasure, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, winner of the Whitbred Best First Novel Award, a New York Times Notable Book, and a national bestseller.
If you liked Mr. Phillips, try these:
by Ian McEwan
Published 2023
From the best-selling author of Atonement and Saturday comes the epic and intimate story of one man's life across generations and historical upheavals. From the Suez Crisis to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall to the current pandemic, Roland Baines sometimes rides with the tide of history, but more often struggles against it.
by Amit Chaudhuri
Published 2016
A beguiling new novel, at once wistful and ribald, about a day in the life of two Indian men in London, each coping in his own way with alienation, solitariness, and the very art of living.
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim
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