Tim Binding — Anthem

Picador 2003 Paperback, 406pp. In 1952, in London's last great fog, a small boy, Henry Armstrong, is separated from his mother. Thirty years later, as a bandsman in the Royal Marines and bound for the Falklands, he still has not found her. Meanwhile, the life of Henry's childhood friend, shoe salesman Richard Roach, is in crisis. He is missing all of his targets; his feckless and impotent teenage son despises him; and his wife, Ellen, no longer bothers to mask her indifference when he returns each night to their home at the end of Anglefield Road. Richard wants to make things better somehow, but he has little idea where to begin. Richard's neighbour, Suzanne Plimsoll, on the other hand, just wants out: out of her marriage, out of the accusing stares of her stepdaughter, out most of all of Anglefield Road. For her, real life only exists onboard the ocean liner on which she works, her beloved Canberra. Spine creased. (ISBN: 9780330427586). Good.