The long shadows

Skilfully crafted and beautifully written, this novel is the story of Tim Harker-Jones, a writer bequeathed with the task of undertaking a biography of a friend from the past, an apparently xenophobic British novelist whose character could be thought to bear some resemblance to Philip Larkin. Set against the background of Thatcher's England and Ceusecscu's Romania, his task involves a series of intrigues that intertwine cultural ambition and political expediency and reveal a truth far more comolex than he initially expected.