Be careful what you wish for

Adam Foulds’s fourth novel, Dream Sequence, is an exquisitely concocted, riveting account of artistic ambition and unrequited love verging on obsession. In previous novels he has been interested in exploring the limits of perception and knowledge. Here he examines, with beautiful, forensic attention, the minds of a young, thrusting English actor, Henry Banks (a mix of Dan Stevens and Henry Cavill), and Kristin, an American divorcée with a stalkerish crush on him from the other side of the world. She writes letters, decorated with butterflies: ‘He was the key signature in which the music of her life was played.’

This is a novel about celebrity and its consequences, with Henry as, in his own words, a ‘permeating light’. Ranged about him, like orbiting planets, are various others, each exhibiting complex layers of desire. It’s not the first time Foulds has written about such things; his Booker shortlisted novel, The Quickening Maze, was in some part driven by the aura of fame which blazed around the poets Tennyson and Clare.