Heads you win - Ferdinand Mount

For the final appointment of his long career, senior civil servant Gus Cotton is offered a dead-end posting in Swansea (Dept of Driving Licences). He decides to chuck it and embrace instead the infamous governmental 'package' - only to be rescued from the ritualised humiliations of early retirement by an unexpected job offer -Thus is it that Gus finds himself in a trendy, minimalist, riverside office among decaying wharves in the East End, one of the Four Musketeers of Heads You Win: Executive search for the 21st century - Make every Job change a Life change. Two of Gus's partners - a disgraced wheeler-dealer and a convicted drug smuggler - are, like him, older men in search of one last all-out glorious fling. The fourth musketeer is a girl - a young woman with straight brown hair and a genius for IT. Gus is not so much a player as an observer, detached, insecure and ironic. His amazed and amazing narration leads the reader on a quest worthy of his favourite John Buchan adventure story.

Ferdinand Mount was Editor of The Times Literary Supplement from 1991 to 2003. He is a reviewer, influential columnist and political commentator. He was awarded the Hawthornden Prize forOf love and asthma(Vintage)