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Book Summary and Reviews of Capital by John Lanchester

Capital by John Lanchester

Capital

A Novel

by John Lanchester

  • Published:
  • May 2013, 528 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

Each house on Pepys Road, an ordinary street in London, has seen its fair share of first steps and last breaths, and plenty of laughter in between.

But each of the street's residents―a rich banker and his shopaholic wife, a soccer prodigy from Senegal, Pakistani shop owners, a dying old woman and her graffiti-artist son―is receiving a menacing postcard with a simple message: "We Want What You Have." Who is behind this? What do they really want? In Capital, John Lanchester ("an elegant and wonderfully witty writer"―New York Times) delivers a warm and compassionate novel that captures the anxieties of our time―property values going up, fortunes going down, a potential terrorist around every corner―with an unforgettable cast of characters.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Lanchester [is] a brainy, pleasure-loving polymath [and] reading Capital is like getting a crash course in the transformation of British mores and class distinctions." ―New York Times Book Review

"Full of spectacular comedy―and menace." ―Washington Post

"Perfect fireside reading that captures the Trollopean 'way we live now' without putting on grand airs." ―Vanity Fair

This information about Capital 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.

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Author Information

John Lanchester Author Biography

John Lanchester was born in Hamburg in 1962. He grew up in the Far East, but was educated in England. A former editor at the publishers Penguin, he is a member of the editorial board of the London Review of Books and is a regular contributor to several newspapers and magazines, including Granta, the New Yorker, The Observer, for whom he was restaurant critic, and the Daily Telegraph, for whom he writes a weekly column.

His first novel, the highly acclaimed The Debt to Pleasure (1996), is the erudite and unorthodox autobiography of sinister gourmet Tarquin Winot. It won the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Betty Trask Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, and an American prize, the Julia Child Award for 'literary food writing'. The novel has been translated into 20 languages. His second book, the ...

... Full Biography

Other books by John Lanchester at BookBrowse
  • The Wall jacket
  • Mr. Phillips jacket
  • Fragrant Harbor jacket
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Read-Alikes

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    The Balcony

    by Jane Delury

    Published 2019

    About this book

    A century-spanning portrait of the inhabitants of a French village, revealing the deception, despair, love, and longing beneath the calm surface of ordinary lives.

  • Elsewhere Home jacket

    Elsewhere Home

    by Leila Aboulela

    Published 2019

    About this book

    A rich tableau of life as an immigrant abroad, and the challenges of navigating assimilation and difference. Elsewhere, Home draws us ineluctably into the lives of her characters as they forge new identities and reshape old ones.

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