A huge critical success on first publication in 2004, the novel went on to win that year's Man Booker Prize. It was adapted for television and broadcast on BBC2 in 2006.

It is the summer of 1983, and young Nick Guest, an innocent in the matters of politics and money, has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: Gerald, an ambitious new Tory MP, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their children Toby and Catherine. As the boom years of the mid-80s unfold, Nick becomes caught up in the Feddens' world, while pursuing his own private obsession, with beauty - a prize as compelling to him as power and riches are to his friends.