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.
| Primary Genre | Modern and Contemporary Fiction |
| Recommendations: |
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London, the week before Christmas, 2007. Over seven days, we follow the lives of seven major characters: a hedge fund manager trying to bring off the biggest trade of his career; a professional footballer recently arrived from Poland; a young lawyer with little work and too much time to speculate; a student who has been led astray by Islamist theory; a hack book-reviewer; a schoolboy hooked on skunk and reality TV; and, a Tube train driver whose Circle Line train joins these and countless other lives together in a daily loop.
With daring skill, the novel pieces together the complex patterns and crossings of modern urban life. Greed, the dehumanising effects of the electronic age and the fragmentation of society are some of the themes dealt with in this savagely humorous book. The writing on the wall appears in letters ten feet high, but the characters refuse to see it - and party on as though tomorrow is a dream. Sebastian Faulks probes not only the self-deceptions of this intensely realised group of people, but their hopes and loves as well. As the novel moves to its gripping climax, they are forced, one by one, to confront the true nature of the world they inhabit.
A Week in December features in the following genres: Modern and Contemporary Fiction, eBooks of the Month, General Fiction, Fiction, Recommendations
A Week in December is available in Paperback, Hardback
A Week in December was written by Sebastian Faulks and published by Vintage an imprint of CCV
A Week in December has 392 pages
