"Lanchester employs a bird’s-eye view that sweeps in for dazzling close-ups, then swoops out again, until you see not only the entirety of Pepys Road, but the city, the world—and the economy that’s crumbling under the weight of everyone’s aspirations."
New York Magazine - Laura Lippman
"A big, funny, sure-footed novel…rich in observation and warm in spirit."
"Perfect fireside reading that captures the Trollopean ‘way we live now’ without putting on grand airs."
Vanity Fair - James Wolcott
"Not only immensely enjoyable but important, too."
"As enrapturing as it is psychologically acute…Capital portrays an authentic slice of contemporary life on the eve of change in a way that recalls Franzen—with a welcome touch of wry humor."
"Searching, expert, on the money. I loved it."
"Fresh, astutely observed, and a lot of fun."
Boston Globe - Sebastian Smee
"Full of spectacular comedy—and menace."
"Capital comes in a great tradition of novels which are filled with the news of now, in which the intricacies of the present moment are noticed with clarity and relish and then brilliantly dramatized. It is clear that its characters, its wisdom, and the scope and range of its sympathy, will fascinate readers into the far future."
"Brilliant."
NPR Books - Lizzie Skurnick
Lanchester (The Debt to Pleasure) follows on the heels of 2010’s I.O.U., a nonfiction dissection of the great recession, by covering much of the same territory in this barely allegorical study of class conflict and reversal of fortune. The affluent residents of London’s Pepys Road suburb are a handy cross-section of late-2007 types: Roger Yount, a banker riding high and counting on his bonus to cover mortgages and the needs of his spoiled wife; Shahid, the son of Pakistani immigrants working the family shop; the 17-year old soccer prodigy Freddy Kamo; Quentina Mkfesi, an educated Zimbabwean refugee turned traffic warden; the elderly Petunia Howe, living repository of Pepys Road’s postwar rise; and Petunia’s grandson, a Banksy-type artist named Smitty. This is just a sample of the cast, most of whom begin receiving mysterious cards reading “We Want What You Have.” Like clockwork, the quality of life on Pepys Road goes south, with arrests, injuries, illnesses, and financial undoing. But it’s hard to care, with predictable and seldom insightful plot threads, and Lanchester reducing his characters to their socio-economic parameters as surely as the market itself. The result is an obsequious, transparent attempt at an epochal “financial crash” novel that is as thin as a 20-dollar bill. Agent: Caradoc King, AP Watt. (June)
The elderly Patricia Howe has a grandson named Smitty who does famously anonymous artworks in the public sphere that border on vandalism. Roger Yount, who works in the City, will likely go broke if he doesn't get an expected million-pound bonus, even as his shallowly consumerist wife plans her own Christmas getaway and hires ambitious Polish worker Bogdan (really named Zbigniew) to do more home improvements. Michael "Mickey" Lipton-Miller rents a house to a promising young football star from Senegal and his dad, while down the street Ahmed Kamal runs a shop with the help of family that includes dreamy pretend-rebel brother Shadid. Meanwhile, Quentina, an educated woman from Zimbabwe, hands out parking tickets but as an illegal keeps her head down. What do they have in common? They're all associated with Pepys Road in South London, where residents have been receiving vaguely ominous postcards saying "We Want What You Have." And their stories crash together in painful ways, sometimes because of the cards. VERDICT Lanchester (The Debt to Pleasure) weaves together multiple stories in an uncanny microcosm of contemporary British life that's incredibly rich and maybe just a bit heavy, like a pastry. Yet definitely worth a look. [See Prepub Alert, 12/5/11.]—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
Elegant, elegiac, eloquent novel of London life in the time when things lolly-related are definitively beginning to fall to pieces. Pepys Road was once such a nice street, a place destroyed by a V-2 rocket in World War II and rebuilt in such a way that aspirational veterans and young people could buy a stake in the British Dream. But that was then. Now, in 2007, after boom and bust and boom and bust, in a time of "bonuses which were big multiples of the national average salary, and a general climate of hysteria [that] affected everything to do with house prices"--well, only the rich can afford to buy in, and the old-timers are increasingly besieged. One of them is the well-heeled and pound-laden banker around whom Lanchester's (Fragrant Harbor , 2002, etc.) novel, as leisurely and complex as an Edith Wharton yarn, turns. But even he is much put-out, since his wife can't seem to get it in her head that money is not simply a thing to be spent at every waking moment. Meanwhile, from out in the darkness, messages are raining down, vaguely threatening, saying, "We want what you have." Ah, but practically everyone in this book wants everything, and those who don't want at least something that they don't have, from lost youth to a little peace and quiet. Who are the authors of these mystery demands? One thing that DI Mill (think, fleetingly, of John Stuart) concludes is that, first, they're not Nigerians or Kosovars or Eskimos, and second, though capable of better things, he's glad to have the distraction, even if "when he was doing routine repetitive work, that it was the equivalent of harnessing a racehorse to a plough." Mill finds plenty to do, and so does Roger, our banker, who's got a financial empire to save on top of his own bankbook and marriage. An expertly written novel of modern manners, with moments that read as if David Lodge or Malcolm Bradbury had stepped out of academia to take on the world of money and power.