Fold

Description

Five friends. One year. All bets are off. Reading, 2009. It may not be Vegas, but for Nick, Doug, Vijay, Alan and Simon, it's as good as they're going to get. Each in their forties, and beset by anxieties, flaws and frustrations, they meet monthly in each other's houses for a 'friendly' game of poker, enabling Doug to show off his newly-minted wealth, Simon to insist on serving only red wine and goats' cheese and Nick - swimming in a cocktail of envy, fear, bravado and disappointment - to make increasingly desperate attempts to bring an end to his interminable losing streak. While Vijay meticulously records every win and loss on his spreadsheet, and Alan frets about his propensity to break into sweat and his inability to get his wife pregnant, Nick becomes obsessed with the idea of engineering Doug's downfall: Doug, who with his big house, his successful business and his appalling taste is both everything that Nick aspires to and resents. Convinced of the heroic nature of his task, he aims to triumph over Doug in poker, as well as in life, and in doing so he comes into troubling proximity to Sophia, Doug's clever and beautiful wife ...

Tom Campbell read history at Edinburgh University, and worked as Cultural Strategy Advisor to the Mayor of London. He lives in North London with his wife and three sons. Fold is his first novel.

Hornbyesque with a touch of Nick Cave's Grinder Man album thrown in ... a hilarious expose of the insane levels of competition between blokes * Daily Mail * You need know nothing about cards to relish the scabrous black comedy of five such men and their monthly game in Tom Campbell's scintillating debut novel ... he echoes the precise, unbridled nastiness of early 1980s Martin Amis * Metro * Has the makings of a cult classic ***** * Sun * A highly entertaining first novel * Oxford Times * Campbell's sentences have a snap to them ... He makes you want to read the next page. It's as simple as that * Guardian *