A financially comfortable but troubled young London author, Alex Hargreaves stumbles across the work of an unknown writer from the early 1990s, Vernon Crane, and presuming the missing Crane is dead, decides to pass the work off as his own. The problem is that the novel he wishes to plagiarize has been split among Crane's disparate and scattered group of friends, all of whom, twenty years later, are struggling with the demands of a life in a Britain in which current trends toward inequality and the concentration of political power have accelerated. Hargreave's mission to track down Crane's...