Description

From a rising British novelist, an artful meditation on love and life in contemporary London

When David Pinner introduces his former teacher, the American artist Ruth Marks, to his friend and flatmate James Glover, he unwittingly sets in place a love triangle loaded with tension, guilt, and heartbreak. As David plays reluctant witness (and more) to James and Ruth's escalating love affair, he must come to terms with his own blighted emotional life. Set in the London art scene awash with new money and intellectual pretension, in the sleek galleries and posh restaurants of a Britannia resurgent with cultural and economic power, Nick Laird's insightful and drolly satirical novel vividly portrays three people whose world gradually fractures along the ineluctable fault lines of desire, truth, deceit, and jealousy. With wit, compassion, and acuity, Laird explores the very nature of contemporary romance-"The Death of Love in Modern Culture," as David puts it in one of his dyspeptic blog posts-among damaged souls whose hearts and heads never quite line up long enough for them to achieve true happiness.

About the Author

Nick Laird was born in Northern Ireland in 1975 and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. He is the author of two collections of poetry and the acclaimed novel Utterly Monkey. He currently teaches creative writing at Columbia University in New York.

Praise for Glover's Mistake…

" At once a penetrating work of literary analysis and a riveting historical narrative."
-Nathaniel Philbrick