A review by patsmith139
Capital by John Lanchester

4.0

A very readable & enjoyable book about a wealthy street in London. We see a banker & his unpleasant, high maintenance wife; a widowed pensioner who has lived in her home since before it was worth a million; the Asian family who run, the newsagents; the Polish builder; the Hungarian nanny; the ‘contemporary’ artist who goes under the pseudonym of Smiffy; the traffic warden from Zimbabwe who isn’t quite what she seems and the young African footballer with a wonderful gift. We see the interaction and the adventures of these characters, who are all linked by the mysterious ‘We Want What You Have’ messages that start to drop into the residents’ letterboxes. Events of recent times touch our characters’ lives; the obscene amounts of money in banking and the eventual collapses that followed, terrorism; immigration and the treatment of asylum seekers. And probably an extra character to add to the mix is London herself in all her fabulous diversity.