Bøker av John Lanchester

If he's lucky, if nothing goes wrong, he only has two years of this, 729 more nights. The best thing that can happen is that he survives and gets off the Wall and never has to spend another day of his life anywhere near it. Along with the rest of his squad, he will endure cold and fear day after day, night after night.

With an introduction by John BanvilleWinner of the Whitbread First Novel Award 1996.To like something is to want to ingest it and, in that sense, is to submit to the world; to like something is to succumb, in a small but contentful way, to death.Tarquin Winot - hedonist, food obsessive, ironist and snob - travels a circuitous route from the Hotel Splendide in Portsmouth to his cottage in Provence. Along the way he tells the story of his childhood and beyond through a series of delectable menus, organized by season. But this is no ordinary cookbook, and as we are drawn into Tarquin's world, a far more sinister mission slowly reveals itself . . .Winner of the 1996 Whitbread First Novel Award, John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure is a wickedly funny ode to food; an erotic and sensual culinary journey. Its elegant, intelligent and unhinged narrator is nothing less than a work of art himself.

'Endlessly witty, but the wit is underpinned by a tremendous, unembarrassed anger and moral lucidity. A superb guide which will turn any reader into an expert within the space of 200 pages' Jonathan Coe There's probably a word in German for that feeling you get when you can understand something while it's being explained to you, but lose hold of the explanation as soon as it stops. A lot of writing about the credit crunch has that effect: you can grasp it while it's going on, and then as soon as it's over, you can no longer remember the difference between a CDO, a CDS, an MBS, and a toasted cheese sandwich. Whoops! makes it possible for all of us to grasp how we found ourselves in this predicament.What went wrong? In 2000, the total GDP of Earth was $36 trillion. At the start of 2007 it was $70 trillion. Today that growth has gone suddenly and sharply into decline, with an effect roughly resembling that of putting a car into reverse while doing seventy down a motorway. John Lanchester is a journalist, novelist and winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the New Yorker, with a monthly column in Esquire. John's piece on our love affair with the City, 'Cityphilia', generated much response on its publication in January 2008 and indeed predicted a worldwide crash based on the misuse of financial derivatives. In October 2008 he charted the crisis as it had developed over the year in 'Cityphobia', which also attracted much attention as a piece that explained not only what had happened, but how we felt about it. John was raised in South-East Asia and now lives in London John Lanchester travels with a cast of characters - including reckless banksters, snoozing regulators, complacent politicians, predatory lenders, credit-drunk spendthrifts, and innocent bystanders to understand deeply and genuinely what is happening and why we feel the way we do.

Selfie sticks with demonic powers. Cold calls from the dead. And the creeping suspicion that none of this is real. Reality, and Other Stories is a gathering of deliciously chilling entertainments from John Lanchester, the Booker-nominated author of The Wall and Capital.

Winner of the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel and a New York Times Notable Book, John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure is a wickedly funny ode to food. Traveling from Portsmouth to the south of France, Tarquin Winot, the book's snobbish narrator, instructs us in his philosophy on everything from the erotics of dislike to the psychology of the menu. Under the guise of completing a cookbook, Winot is in fact on a much more sinister mission that only gradually comes to light.

Money is our global language. Yet so few of us can speak it. The language of the economic elite can be complex, jargon-filled and completely baffling. Above all, the language of money is the language of power - power in the hands of the same economic elite.Now John Lanchester, bestselling author of Capital and Whoops! sets out to decode the world of finance for all of us, explaining everything from high-frequency trading and the World Bank to the difference between bullshit and nonsense.As funny as it is devastating, How To Speak Money is a primer and a polemic. It's a reference book you'll find yourself reading in one sitting. And it gives you everything you need to demystify the world of high finance - the world that dominates how we all live now.

One warm July morning Mr Phillips climbs out of bed, leaving Mrs Phillips dozing. He prepares for his commute into the city - but this is no ordinary Wednesday. It is a day on which Mr Phillips will chat with a pornographer, stalk a tv mini-celebrity, have lunch with an aspiring record mogul, and get caught up in a bank robbery. It is, as Mr Phillips comes to realise, the first day of the rest of his life - whether he wants it to be or not. All this is both better and worse than being at work. So why is Mr Phillips, a cautious middle-aged accountant, not behind his desk calculating the financial consequences of redundancies or recommending the savings to be made from more responsible use of yellow sticky note pads?

Fragrant Harbour is the story of four people whose intertwined lives span Asia's last seventy years. Tom Stewart leaves England just before it is hit by the Great Depression to seek his fortune, and finds it in running Hong Kong's best hotel. Sister Maria is a beautiful and uncompromising Chinese nun whom Stewart meets on the boat out from England; their friendship spans decades and changes both their lives. Dawn Stone is an English journalist who becomes the public face of money and power and big business. Matthew Ho is a young Chinese entrepreneur whose life has been shaped by painful choices made long before his birth, and who is now facing his own difficulties, and opportunities, in the twenty-first century. The complacency of colonial life in the 1930s; the horrors of the Japanese occupation during the Second World War; the post-war boom and transformation of Hong Kong into a laboratory of capitalism at its most cut-throat; the growth of the Triads; the handover of the city to the Chinese - all these are present in Fragrant Harbour, an epic novel of one of the world's great cities.

The residents of Pepys Road, London - a banker and his shopaholic wife, an elderly woman dying of a brain tumour, the Pakistani family who run the local shop, the young football star from Senegal and his minder - all receive anonymous postcards with a simple message: We Want What You Have. Who is behind it? What do they want? As the mystery of the postcards deepens, the world around Pepys Road is turned upside down by the financial crash and all of its residents' lives change beyond recognition over the course of the next year. From the bestselling author of Whoops! and How to Speak Money comes a post-financial crisis, state-of-the-nation novel told with compassion, humour and unflinching truth.

In this acclaimed memoir from the award-winning author of Fragrant Harbour and Capital, John Lanchester pieces together his family's past and uncovers their extraordinary secrets - from his grandparents' life in colonial Rhodesia to his mother's time as a nun - with clear-eyed compassion. A true story of family intrigues, of secrets and lies, as they unfold across three generations.