Daniel Soar writes:

And now A Week in December steps into the actual present, being set in London at the end of 2007. Its major and minor characters include a hedge-fund manager, a radicalised young Muslim, a Polish footballer, a pickle magnate, an embittered literary critic, and the wife of ‘Britain’s newest MP’, who is organising a party for all the rest (with the exception of the radicalised young Muslim). This gathering – which is due to take place at the hostess’s beautifully appointed Notting Hill home – promises to be explosive, though the explosion won’t be one of personalities so much as the forces they represent, since each of them stands for one of Britain’s many classes, and since the novel presents itself as satire, romance’s polar opposite.

(LRB 5 November 2009)

Hutchinson | hardback 518 pp. |ISBN: 9780091794453