After a number of entertainingly unsuccessful relationships, Richard marries Sarah and they retreat from London to a country cottage in the Suffolk village of Worth. That name, with its layered meaning, gives a hint of the very particular comic style deployed in this novel. Richard and Sarah find themselves living next door to Catherine and a friendship develops, characterised by a series of delicate rebuffs and rapprochements. The agonies of being a neighbour haven't been so well anatomised since The Good Life. There are some lovely plot twists, but this is not a situation comedy so much as a grammatical one, the humour being wrung out of tightly wound sentences, drop by distilled drop. With an unusual degree of control, Canter seems somehow to have engineered the novel's action purely in order to deliver his impressive linguistic flourishes and set pieces. He can execute a verbal three-point turn in the tightest cul-de-sac of a sentence. It's skilful stuff and mesmerising to read. Funny, too.