The Planner (34 page)

Five friends. One year. All bets are off.

Reading, 2009. It may not be Vegas, but for Nick, Doug, Vijay, Alan and Simon, it's as good as they're going to get.

Each in their forties, and beset by anxieties, flaws and frustrations, they meet monthly in each other's houses for a ‘friendly’ game of poker, enabling Doug to show off his new-minted wealth, Simon to insist on serving only red wine and goat’s cheese and Nick – swimming in a cocktail of envy, fear, bravado and disappointment – to make increasingly desperate attempts to bring an end to his interminable losing streak.

While Vijay meticulously records every win and loss on his spreadsheet, and Alan frets about his propensity to break into sweat and his inability to get his wife pregnant, Nick becomes obsessed with the idea of engineering Doug's downfall: Doug, who with his big house, his successful business and his appalling taste is both everything that Nick aspires to and resents. Convinced of the heroic nature of his task, he aims to triumph over Doug in poker, as well as in life, and in doing so he comes into troubling proximity to Sophia, Doug's clever and beautiful wife. . .

 
‘Scintillating debut novel . . . He echoes the precise, unbridled nastiness of early 1980s Martin Amis . . . Defies you not to laugh out loud even as you gasp in horror at the amorality’
Metro

‘Darkly comic . . .
Fold
has the makings of a cult classic’
Sun

‘A comedy of manners . . . Campbell’s sentences have a snap to them . . . It has the courage to be unpleasant about its characters, and the heart to challenge that unpleasantness. It is, in fact, cleverer than it lets on’
Guardian

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First published in Great Britain 2014

This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright © 2014 by Tom Campbell

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Extracts appearing as chapter headings from
The London Plan: Spatial

Development Strategy for Greater London
. Greater London Authority, 2011.

Reproduced with kind permission of the Mayor of London

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 4088 3304 9

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