Making Nice

Description

The deliciously sharp new novel from Ferdinand Mount, author of the Sunday Times Book of the Year Kiss Myself Goodbye Ferdinand Mount's stinging satire plunges into the dubious world of London PR firms, the back rooms of Westminster and the campaign trail in Africa and America. We follow the hapless Dickie Pentecost, redundant diplomatic correspondent for a foundering national newspaper, together with his stern oncologist wife Jane, and their daughters Flo, an aspiring ballerina, and the quizzical teenager Lucy. The whole family find themselves entangled in an ever more alarming series of events revolving around the elusive Ethel (full name Ethelbert), dynamic founder of the soaring public relations agency Making Nice. With echoes of Evelyn Waugh and The Thick of It, Making Nice is a masterly take on the madness of contemporary society and the limitless human capacity for self-deception.

Ferdinand Mount is a novelist, essayist and former editor of the Times Literary Supplement from 1991 to 2002. He was previously head of the Number Ten Policy Unit under Margaret Thatcher. As a journalist, he has contributed regular columns to The Spectator, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times. His novel Of Love and Asthma, part of a six-volume series, A Chronicle of Modern Twilight, won the Hawthornden Prize in 1992. He lives in North London with his family.

Ferdinand Mount's exquisite writing draws you into a gorgeously horrid world of lies, where all authenticity is faked, and where the biggest deceptions are the ones we practise upon ourselves. Perhaps you recognise the place he's talking about. He exposes such cold truths with such warmth - I am in eternal awe of his writing, wherever I find it. * Marina Hyde * Mount's storytelling is irresistible * Literary Review * One of our finest prose stylists * Daily Telegraph * Making Nice is the funniest, shrewdest, most elegant novel I have read in years. What will Mount conjure up next? * The Oldie *