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A biting portrait of British class, politics, and money told through five interconnected families and their rising―and declining―fortunes.
Campbell Flynn, art historian, professor, and fêted fixture of the literati, always knew that when his life came crashing down, it would happen in public―yet he never imagined that a single year in London would expose so much.
He's never taken other people half as seriously as they take themselves, which is the first of his mistakes. The second is a new project: opportunistic and precisely calibrated to rake in a fortune. Riding on the high of a best-selling biography of Vermeer and fielding more inquiries and requests than he has the time or patience to pursue, Campbell has nevertheless still not managed to shake the question of money. The fact of his quiet loan from a school friend now embroiled in scandal makes the ever-present worry feel even more pressing. His unflappable agent, Atticus; his steadfast wife, Elizabeth; his sister, Moira, crusading parliamentarian for the poor; his well-adjusted, well-off adult children, Angus and Kenzie; and all the outward trappings of success can't conceal that something in his life is off.
As Campbell becomes increasingly entangled with a brilliant student, convention-smashing and working class, like he used to be, he feels he's been given a second chance to embrace the change that frightens him, even as he sees trouble brewing for his family and friends. Campbell's personal quest takes him down darker roads than he could have imagined, and all his worlds―the art scene and academia, fashion and the English aristocracy, journalism and the internet―collide in spectacular fashion, culminating in one shocking night on Caledonian Road.
"An epic way-we-live-now social novel set in a rapidly corroding London... O'Hagan shares [Tom] Wolfe's gift for delivering a panoply of unique characters... There's no doubting the scope of [O'Hagan's] ambition; when future generations seek to understand post-pandemic Britain, this will be one of the first places they look. A sprawling critique of so-called polite society." ―Kirkus Reviews
"An addictively enjoyable yarn; a state-of-the-nation social novel with the swagger and bling of an airport bestseller and an insider's grasp on the nuances of high culture.... A bold, bullish tale of hubris and corruption, a book simultaneously dazzled and disgusted by the city it depicts... Nimble, lively and sure-footed." ―The Guardian
"A pitch-perfect tragicomedy of manners... A book―it's hard to resist the word Dickensian―that feels as near an authentic slice of contemporary London life as any packed tube carriage." ― Observer (Book of the Week)
"A searing Dickensian portrait of modern Britain... Gloriously ambitious." ―Sunday Times (UK)
This information about Caledonian Road was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Jerry Bauer
Andrew O'Hagan, a Scottish novelist and essayist, is a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, a three-time nominee for the Booker Prize, the editor-at-large of the London Review of Books, and a contributor to The New Yorker. He lives in London.
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