UNFINISHED BUSINESS focuses on an ordinary suburban office worker, fundamentally weak but always keeping his eyes fixed on some horizon where a heightened, romantic, better world must surely exist.
Faced with the regular stuff of life - work, aspiration, marriage, age, divorce, bereavement - his ordinary plight is sharpened, becoming increasingly urgent.
Having lived in a modern condition, confusing pleasure with happiness, wanting the dream to deliver, what do you do when you notice the shadows begin to lengthen on the lawn?
Read MoreUnfinished Business is humane, intimate and affecting because it explores universal themes - ageing, marriage, friendship, mortality - and celebrates beauty - Financial TimesThe tenor of Unfinished Business feels dreamlike, fragmentary, except that the writing is also exact and alert, anchored very particularly in time and place. Better known as a cultural critic, Bracewell hasn't published a novel in 21 years. This is quite the comeback . . . The overall tone is so measured that the tragic event at the novel's climax stuns like a concussion - worse than that, because it's not even the tragedy we thought we had seen coming - GuardianThis sense of innocence and wanting is what gives this eerie novel its power to move and frighten . . . Bracewell excels at this kind of shocked satire, of London's continuing grand delusions - TLSI was won over by this quietly reflective gem of a novel about regret, ageing, and the memory of lost love - Independent