SOUTH OF THE RIVER PB B FORMAT – BLAKE MORRISON

It opens on the new dawn of Labour s election victory in 1997, and ends five years later. But this is not so much state of the nation as state of our souls, marriages, families, hopes and careers – a sharp and sexy portrait of a dysfunctional group of characters, all different yet connected. There s Nat, failed dramatist and reluctant lecturer, falling for a younger woman; Anthea, an eco-friendly lost soul obesessed with foxes; Libby, hardworking mother and advertising executive; Harry, Nat s friend and ex-pupil, a journalist on a local paper, with a guilty secret of his own; and Jack, Nat s unexpectedly poignant uncle, who lives for fox-hunting. Intimate and disconcerting, compelling and comic, an anatomy of the way things are, South of the River is the big British novel for our times – and a tour de force.