Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts on 14 October 2010.

This is Sebastian Faulks' first novel set in present day Britain. Here he explores our lives from the polar extremes of a rich but morally bankrupt hedge fund manager to fundamentalist Islamic students - and most of us in between. With customary literary insight, Faulks reveals a world that is diverging rather than converging. A society but certainly not a community.

Comparison: Pat Barker, Ken Kesey, Ian McEwan
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Synopsis

It's London, the week before Christmas 2007. Over seven wintry days, we follow the lives of seven characters across the city, from a hedge fund manager to a Tube train driver. Above the complex patterns of modern urban life, the writing on the wall appears in letters ten feet high, but the characters refuse to see it. As the gripping climax looms, they are forced, one by one, to awake from their blinkered present to confront the true nature of the world they inhabit.

Reviews

‘Readers will race through the pages like bankers through cash’ Guardian

'Faulks’s most vivid character is the odious John Veals, a hedge-fund manager, who relishes
all the money that he makes and the power that he quietly exerts… Veals is brilliantly
insidious… A thoughtful page-turner … The handsome sunset is heavily, and rightly, weighed
down by dark clouds.' - The Times

'During times of momentous change, men of letters are driven to produce works that
fictionalise the state of the nation, linking individuals with historic events. The 19th century
gave us Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend and Trollope’s The Way We Live
Now; the 21st has given us Sebastian Faulks’s A Week in December' - Sunday Times

'This vast novel, well-plotted and gripping throughout, is the first that Sebastian Faulks has
set in our time… the ambition and scope of the book are to be applauded. The conclusion is
suitably nail-biting and, pleasingly, love triumphs. Sebastian Faulks has probably got another
best-seller on his hands.' - Spectator

'A portrayal of modern London that is both richly entertaining and highly rewarding. Faulks
has come as close as anyone to completing the jigsaw that is this crazy, fascinating city of
ours.' - Evening Standard

About the Author

Sebastian Faulks was born and brought up in Newbury, Berkshire. He worked in journalism before starting to write books. He is best known for the French trilogy, The Girl at the Lion d'Or, Birdsong and Charlotte Gray (1989-1997) and is also the author of a triple biography, The Fatal Englishman (1996); a small book of literary parodies, Pistache (2006); and the novel Human Traces (2005). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1993 and appointed CBE for services to literature in 2002. He lives in London with his wife and their three children. More books by this author Author 'Like for Like' recommendation