Capital: A Novel

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W. W. Norton & Company, Jun 11, 2012 - Fiction - 527 pages

From the best-selling author of The Debt to Pleasure, a sweeping social novel set at the height of the financial crisis.

Celebrated novelist John Lanchester (“an elegant and wonderfully witty writer”—New York Times) returns with an epic novel that captures the obsessions of our time. It’s 2008 and things are falling apart: Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers are going under, and the residents of Pepys Road, London—a banker and his shopaholic wife, an old woman dying of a brain tumor and her graffiti-artist grandson, Pakistani shop owners and a shadowy refugee who works as the meter maid, the young soccer star from Senegal and his minder—are receiving anonymous postcards reading “We Want What You Have.” Who is behind it? What do they want? Epic in scope yet intimate, capturing the ordinary dramas of very different lives, this is a novel of love and suspicion, of financial collapse and terrorist threat, of property values going up and fortunes going down, and of a city at a moment of extraordinary tension.
 

Selected pages

Contents

Section 1
28
Section 2
44
Section 3
68
Section 4
82
Section 5
110
Section 6
140
Section 7
170
Section 8
178
Section 26
318
Section 27
346
Section 28
352
Section 29
356
Section 30
360
Section 31
364
Section 32
374
Section 33
376

Section 9
182
Section 10
194
Section 11
198
Section 12
204
Section 13
216
Section 14
220
Section 15
232
Section 16
236
Section 17
240
Section 18
250
Section 19
254
Section 20
260
Section 21
276
Section 22
286
Section 23
296
Section 24
300
Section 25
306
Section 34
386
Section 35
392
Section 36
396
Section 37
418
Section 38
426
Section 39
432
Section 40
442
Section 41
446
Section 42
452
Section 43
480
Section 44
484
Section 45
490
Section 46
498
Section 47
502
Section 48
508
Section 49
524
Copyright

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About the author (2012)

John Lanchester is the author of five novels, including The Debt to Pleasure and Capital. His books have been translated into more than twenty-five languages, and he is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. He lives in London.

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