Richly entertaining and highly rewarding

During times of momentous change, men of letters are driven to produce works that fictionalise the state of the nation, linking individuals with historic events. The 19th century gave us Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend and Trollope’s The Way We Live Now; the 21st has given us Sebastian Faulks’s A Week in December

Often edgily satirical, sometimes deeply affecting, A Week in December grasps its headline motifs with the strong and supple hands of a master

Hilarious… The satire is so vicious that at times it’s like reading a Tom Sharpe novel

This vast novel, well-plotted and gripping throughout, is the first that Sebastian Faulks has set in our time…the ambition and scope of the book are to be applauded. The conclusion is suitably nail-biting and, pleasingly, love triumphs. Sebastian Faulks has probably got another best-seller on his hands

A zeitgeisty novel about the effects of greed, celebrity, the electronic age and the fragmentation of urban life. It’s gripping stuff…sweeping and satirical, A Week in December is a thrilling state-of-the-nation novel

The novel is cleverly plotted and eminently readable

Faulks never writes a hackneyed or lazy sentence, polishing each with care

Page-turning portrait of noughties’ London

One can’t mistake Faulk’s ambition, and his take on the contemporary life is never less than readable