The late J. G. Farrell, author of Troubles and The Siege of Krishnapur, used to say that he never read novels by contemporaries: the bad ones bored him while the good ones upset him because they had been written by someone else. I do not know what he would have made of William Nicholson’s The Society of Others, but for me it is a novel that I would dearly love to have written yet one whose message is an antidote to envy. It is exciting, funny, wise and beautifully written.
The hero is a young man of 22 who, having graduated from university, remains shut up in his bedroom paralysed by a black cynicism.
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