Dockhead — Paul Goodman

Everyone wants to be filled. Modern-lifers long for meaning, and from Dockhead, London, Edward Fisher sees this clearer than most: in Nancy, his novelist wife, in search of her working-class roots; in lovelorn friends; in his workaholic editor; and in Blake, his famous and distant father, filled with regret. So when Nancy disappears midway through writing her third book, Ed must figure out why before she is swallowed by a media frenzy and he is forced to live out the plots to her past and future works.

The first from a trilogy of books on disillusion in very modern terms, Dockhead is about finding identity in love, in art, through work, sex, drugs, and finding fulfilment through the worlds created by fiction â€" though fulfilment may be a fiction in itself.