Celebrated novelist JohnLanchester ( an elegant and wonderfully witty writer New York Times) returns with an epic novel that captures theobsessions of our time. It s 2008 and things are falling apart: Bear Stearnsand Lehman Brothers are going under, and the residents of Pepys Road, London abanker and his shopaholic wife, an old woman dying of a brain tumor and hergraffiti-artist grandson, Pakistani shop owners and a shadowy refugee who worksas the meter maid, the young soccer star from Senegal and his minder arereceiving anonymous postcards reading We Want What You Have. Who is behindit? What do they want? Epic in scope yet intimate, capturing the ordinarydramas of very different lives, this is a novel of love and suspicion, offinancial collapse and terrorist threat, of property values going up andfortunes going down, and of a city at a moment of extraordinary tension.