Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The bestselling, moving and hugely topical story of one street caught on the brink of the crash.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

The elderly Patricia Howe has a grandson named Smitty who does famously anonymous artworks in the public sphere that border on vandalism. Roger Yount, who works in the City, will likely go broke if he doesn't get an expected million-pound bonus, even as his shallowly consumerist wife plans her own Christmas getaway and hires ambitious Polish worker Bogdan (really named Zbigniew) to do more home improvements. Michael "Mickey" Lipton-Miller rents a house to a promising young football star from Senegal and his dad, while down the street Ahmed Kamal runs a shop with the help of family that includes dreamy pretend-rebel brother Shadid. Meanwhile, Quentina, an educated woman from Zimbabwe, hands out parking tickets but as an illegal keeps her head down. What do they have in common? They're all associated with Pepys Road in South London, where residents have been receiving vaguely ominous postcards saying "We Want What You Have." And their stories crash together in painful ways, sometimes because of the cards. VERDICT Lanchester (The Debt to Pleasure) weaves together multiple stories in an uncanny microcosm of contemporary British life that's incredibly rich and maybe just a bit heavy, like a pastry. Yet definitely worth a look. [See Prepub Alert, 12/5/11.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Lanchester (The Debt to Pleasure) follows on the heels of 2010's I.O.U., a nonfiction dissection of the great recession, by covering much of the same territory in this barely allegorical study of class conflict and reversal of fortune. The affluent residents of London's Pepys Road suburb are a handy cross-section of late-2007 types: Roger Yount, a banker riding high and counting on his bonus to cover mortgages and the needs of his spoiled wife; Shahid, the son of Pakistani immigrants working the family shop; the 17-year old soccer prodigy Freddy Kamo; Quentina Mkfesi, an educated Zimbabwean refugee turned traffic warden; the elderly Petunia Howe, living repository of Pepys Road's postwar rise; and Petunia's grandson, a Banksy-type artist named Smitty. This is just a sample of the cast, most of whom begin receiving mysterious cards reading "We Want What You Have." Like clockwork, the quality of life on Pepys Road goes south, with arrests, injuries, illnesses, and financial undoing. But it's hard to care, with predictable and seldom insightful plot threads, and Lanchester reducing his characters to their socio-economic parameters as surely as the market itself. The result is an obsequious, transparent attempt at an epochal "financial crash" novel that is as thin as a 20-dollar bill. Agent: Caradoc King, AP Watt. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Renowned for his sharp humor and impeccable style, British writer Lanchester, winner of the E. M. Forster Award, presents an exceptionally capacious and involving tale about disparate lives in turmoil on London's Pepys Road. Originally a working-class enclave, by 2007 Pepys Road's property values have vaulted sky-high, accompanied by feverish gentrification, most lavishly at Number 51, where banker Roger Yount shrugs off his angry wife's exorbitant spending. While Arabella keeps Zbigniew, a Polish builder, busy redecorating, nothing visible has changed in decades at Number 42, home to the street's oldest resident, widowed Petunia Howe. A young soccer prodigy from Senegal is staying at Number 27. Pakistani Ahmed Kamal owns the shop on the corner. Meter maid Quentina Mkfesi is a Zimbabwean refugee. Smitty, a guerrilla street artist in the mode of the real-life Banksy, keeps his ties to Pepys Road secret. These separate lives gradually converge with profound consequences as each Pepys Road residence begins receiving unnerving postcards carrying the anonymous message, We Want What You Have. Lanchester makes us care deeply about his imperiled characters and their struggles, traumatic and ludicrous, as he astutely illuminates the paradoxes embedded in generosity and greed, age and illness, financial crime and religious fanaticism, immigration, exile, and terror. A remarkably vibrant and engrossing novel about what we truly value.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist