Shopping - Gavin Kramer

Shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award, Shopping is a Lolita for our times set amidst the culture clash of modern Tokyo.

Meadowlark is a lonely man. He pins portraits of the Prime Minister and the Queen to his apartment wall. Sent to work in the Tokyo office, he soon becomes lost and ill at ease in the world of besuited Englishmen who, slaves to the office by day, cruise the neonlit nightspots by night with their dispensable cash, fuelled on alcohol and the prospect of casual sex. It isn't long before Meadowlark undergoes an eerie change that shocks his colleagues: he falls in love with a fourteen-year-old Japanese girl. Gavin Kramer's first novel is the story of this relationship: a portrait of an obsession, a doomed love affair, an Englishman abroad and out of place, bemused and confused and ultimately beaten by an alien culture.