Title: Disappointing. Coe has written much better.
Review: After reading the excellent "House of Sleep" and "What a Carve Up", this came as a big disappointment, although with a few mitigating good features. The basic problem of this book is that its central characters are uninteresting and the plot (such as it is) unabsorbing. The "short stories within a book" at its core are an interesting idea but somehow never quite work properly. At some points it threatens to really take off, with some good secondary characters and scenes (particularly between academics and lawyers)and there are some memorable flashes of humour, but overall it is very unsatisying
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