Meeting the English

'Delightful . . . I relished the whole thing, and didn't want it to end' Philip Pullman

Struan Robertson has read a lot of books and nursed his dying father, but he has never been to England before. Let alone a crumbling house in Hampstead where two wives, a literary agent and a pair of teenage children seem unable to care for Phillip Prys, one-time literary star, current inhabitant of a wheelchair. Struan can do that - but what, he wonders, is everyone else doing? What is up with the weather, the house prices, the chronic shortage of chips and oxygen? And where, in this whirl of difference, of Pimm's and swimming ponds, artists and refugees, might the English be?

'What unfolds is a long, hot summer with more than a little Midsummer Night's Dream about it . . . Meeting the English is an utter delight' Observer