A Week in December

Sebastian Faulks

Jan 2011 · Random House

About this eBook

**NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER**

London, the week before Christmas, 2007.

Seven wintry days to track the lives of seven characters: a hedge fund manager trying to bring off the biggest trade of his career; a professional footballer recently arrived from Poland; a young lawyer with little work and too much time to speculate; a student who has been led astray by Islamist theory; a hack book-reviewer; a schoolboy hooked on skunk and reality TV; and a Tube driver whose Circle Line train joins these and countless other lives together in a daily loop.

With daring skill, the novel pieces together the complex patterns and crossings of modern urban life, and the group is forced, one by one, to confront the true nature of the world they inhabit. Sweeping, satirical, Dickensian in scope, A Week in December is a thrilling state of the nation novel from a master of literary fiction.

Ratings and reviews

This is a very well put together story. The plot lines are well drawn up and all lead purposefully to the conclusion while sometimes subtly and sometimes obviously crossing paths. It is set in London in the present day with references to specific aspects of our culture given different names but similar enough to be recognisable. For example the tv show 'It's Madness' (It's called something like that anyway) is like Big Brother taken to another level. The characters are very well written with well developed backgrounds but some of them were one dimensional and had just one clearly defined driving force. These tended to be the negative characters which made them easy to dislike. The story tackles contemporary issues like Islamic extremism, insanity and global finance. Faulks appears to have a real issue with cyclists. On a number of occasions cyclists without lights and cycling dangerously almost hit various characters. Ironically, when this happens for the final time it triggers an epiphanic change in Hassan which stops him from following one of the most extreme plot lines. The novel ends with the most dislikeable of the characters, Veals, laughing as it looks like his despicable plan to earn himself billions is about to work out. This and Hassan's are the two most extreme plot lines and I was kept engaged till the end wondering how each of them would unfold. While reading about the Veals plot I found it hard to believe it would come to fruition because its effects would be so much further reaching than what Hassan was planning. But the point Faulks is making is that the Veals storyline isn't that far fetched. I feel I should comment on the madness story lines too but it's late now so I'll have to come back to that.

gripping, insightful reading.

About the author

Sebastian Faulks has written nineteen books, of which A Week in December and The Fatal Englishman were number one in the Sunday Times bestseller lists. He is best known for Birdsong, part of his French trilogy, and Human Traces, the first in an ongoing Austrian trilogy. Before becoming a full-time writer, he worked as a journalist on national papers. He has also written screenplays and has appeared in small roles on stage. He lives in London.