Theft - Luke Brown

What Idid to them was terrible, but you have to understand the context. This wasLondon, 2016 . . .
Bohemia is history. Paul has awoken to the fact that he will always bebetter known for reviewing haircuts than for his literary journalism. He isabout to be kicked out of his cheap flat in east London and his sister has gonemissing after an argument about what to do with the house where they grew up.Now that their mother is dead this is the last link they have to the decliningtown on the north-west coast where they grew up.
Enter Emily Nardini, a cult author, who - after granting Paul a rareinterview - receives him into her surprisingly grand home. Paul is immediatelyintrigued: by Emily and her fictions, by her vexingly famous and successfulpartner Andrew (too old for her by half), and later by Andrew's daughterSophie, a journalist whose sexed-up vision of the revolution has gone viral.Increasingly obsessed, relationships under strain, Paul travels up and down,north and south, torn between the town he thought he had escaped and the city thatthreatens to chew him up.
With heart, bite and humour, Luke Brown leads the reader beyond easypartisanship and into much trickier terrain. Straddling the fissures within aman and his country, riven by envy, wealth, ownership, entitlement, and loss, Theft is an exhilarating howl of anovel.

Luke Brown grew up in a former fishing town on the coast of Lancashire. He works as a book editor and is a lecturer at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. He writes regularly for the Financial Times; and sometimes for the TLS, London Review of Books and New Statesman. His debut novel My Biggest Lie was published in 2014, and his fiction has appeared in the White Review.