A Polaroid of Peggy — Richard Phillips

'Funny. Revealing. Wonderful.' Maureen Lipman ___________________________________________ Andrew Williams. Mavis and Syd's boy. Hasn't he done well? Blooming business, lovely wife, beautiful kids, bloody great house. What more could he possible want? And then, an old photo turns up and Andrew's whole world is turned upside down. A story of lost love and lost bearings, 'A Poloroid of Peggy' is 'Bonfire of the Vanities' meets 'Love Story', with a dash of 'Mad Men' thrown in. Funny and poignant by turns, it asks the most fundamental of questions: what really matters in life? And finds the answer is distinctly - muddled. ____________________________________________ 'Richard Phillips is good on nostalgia, guilt, the emotional messes people make, and the play-acting involved in both the building up or breaking down of a relationship, but the main strength of the book lies in the portrayal of the central character, a superficially shallow man desperately trying to paper over the black holes appearing through the old wallpaper of his life. Cynic and romantic, confident and adman, bag of nerves, he is believably ambiguous and skilfully realised, as is the slow build of his obsession with the eponymous Peggy, whose twenty-year-old photo, randomly found in the pocket of an old jacket, triggers a crisis on levels both existential and material.' Carol Birch, author of 'Jamrach's Menagerie', shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012