It's all right now - Charles Chadwick

Tom Ripple is an ordinary man living an ordinary life, and yet, in It's All Right Now, he emerges as one of the most vividly realised characters in contemporary fiction.

From a North London suburb in the 1970s, we pursue and engage with Ripple through to the present day, seeing through his own eyes a series of rich and complex relationships - with wife and children, neighbours, girlfriends, colleagues and friends; and his continuous search for certainties and specifics - both moral and pragmatic. Through the vitality of his perspective and a growing sense of the sorrow and absurdity of the world, Ripple becomes a classic anti-hero, all too aware of his ordinariness, with a ribald sense of humour and an inevitable clumsiness in his attempts at emotional connection with others.

An epic of suburban life and a debut of staggering scope, intimacy and warmth, Ripple's insights into the human condition are full of tenderness and aspire to the transcendent, while his story brilliantly dramatises the profound changes that have taken place in this country in the last thirty years.