Mr. Phillips wakes on a summer's Monday morning in his modest, nearly mortgage-free house, ready to face another ordinary working day. Except this day is far from ordinary, for on the previous Friday, Mr. Phillips was summarily sacked. Unable to deal with this disaster--unable even to tell his own wife--Mr. Phillips rises at his usual hour and prepares himself for the job he no longer has. As he wanders the streets of London, what he sees triggers memories. Gradually a picture develops of a decent man who, only days before, knew exactly who and what he was--husband, home-owner, father, valued employee--and on this day wonders who and what he can become.
Using the bits and pieces of one man's past, John Lanchester has drawn a fully dimensional life and, in the process, made in Mr. Phillips an Everyman for our times.

Mr. Phillips

Literature & Fiction

LANCHESTER, John

Dramas & Plays

Penguin??Books

John Lanchester's Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay is the unbelievable true story of the economic crisis.
 We are, to use a technical economic term, screwed. The cowboy capitalists had a party with everyone's money and now we're all paying for it. What went wrong? And will we learn our lesson - or just carry on as before, like celebrating surviving a heart attack with a packet of Rothmans?
 John Lanchester travels with a cast of characters - including reckless banksters, snoozing regulators, complacent politicians, predatory lenders, credit-drunk spendthrifts, and innocent bystanders to understand deeply and genuinely what is happening and why we feel the way we do.
 'Devastatingly funny ... the route map to the crazed world of contemporary finance we have all been waiting for' Will Self
 'Bang on the money' Independent
 'Explains the crisis in a way that actually sticks ... to my amazement, I finally grasp it' Janice Turner, The Times
 'Endlessly witty ... will turn any reader into an expert within the space of 200 pages' Jonathan Coe 
 'Terrific ... there is no better guide to the crazy world of high finance' GQ
 John Lanchester is a journalist, novelist and winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award. His fiction includes Mr Philips, The Debt to Pleasure and Capital. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the New Yorker, with a monthly column in Esquire.

Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay

Business & Money

Economics

Penguin Books, Ltd.

It is 1935, and Tom Stewart, a young Englishman with a longing for adventure, buys himself a cheap ticket aboard the SS Darjeeling-en route to the complex and corrupt world of Hong Kong. A shipboard wager leads to an unlikely friendship that spans seven decades as Hong Kong endures the savagery of the Japanese occupation, emerging as a crossroads of international finance and the nexus of a world of warlords, drug runners, and Chinese triads.

Fragrant Harbor

United States

Penguin Publishing Group

The author of The Debt to Pleasure digs into his family's extraordinary past in a memoir as enthralling as his finest fiction It was only when his mother died that John Lanchester realized how little he really knew about his parents. With the cache of letters and papers she left behind, he set out to reconstruct just who his parents had been. In doing so, he did much more than trace the remarkable story of a reluctant international banker, a secretive former nun, and the life they shared; he also gained extraordinary insight into his own nature and a deeper understanding of the universal push-pull of family love-and family loss. Part detective work, part evocation of character, this is, above all, compelling storytelling.

Family Romance: A Love Story

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

The Debt to Pleasure: A Novel

Winner of the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel and a New York Times Notable Book, John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure is a wickedly funny ode to food. Traveling from Portsmouth to the south of France, Tarquin Winot, the book's snobbish narrator, instructs us in his philosophy on everything from the erotics of dislike to the psychology of the menu. Under the guise of completing a cookbook, Winot is in fact on a much more sinister mission that only gradually comes to light.

Humor & Satire

Picador

The Debt to Pleasure

Henry_Holt

The Debt to Pleasure.

Contemporary

From the best-selling author of The Debt to Pleasure, a sweeping social novel set at the height of the financial crisis. Celebrated novelist John Lanchester (“an elegant and wonderfully witty writer”―New York Times) returns with an epic novel that captures the obsessions of our time. It’s 2008 and things are falling apart: Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers are going under, and the residents of Pepys Road, London―a banker and his shopaholic wife, an old woman dying of a brain tumor and her graffiti-artist grandson, Pakistani shop owners and a shadowy refugee who works as the meter maid, the young soccer star from Senegal and his minder―are receiving anonymous postcards reading “We Want What You Have.” Who is behind it? What do they want? Epic in scope yet intimate, capturing the ordinary dramas of very different lives, this is a novel of love and suspicion, of financial collapse and terrorist threat, of property values going up and fortunes going down, and of a city at a moment of extraordinary tension.

Capital: A Novel

Literary

W.W.Norton&Company

An entertaining and indispensable guide to the language of finance and economics by the writer hailed for “explain[ing] complex stuff in a down-to-earth and witty style” (The Economist).
To those who don’t speak it, the language of money can seem impenetrable and its ideas too complex to grasp. In How to Speak Money, John Lanchester―author of the New York Times best-selling book on the financial crisis, I.O.U.―bridges the gap between the money people and the rest of us.
With characteristic wit and candor, Lanchester reveals how the world of finance really works: from the terms and conditions of your personal checking account to the evasions of bankers appearing in front of Congress. As Lanchester writes, we need to understand what the money people are talking about so that those who speak the language don’t just write the rules for themselves.
Lanchester explains more than 300 words and phrases from “AAA rating” and “amortization” to “yield curve” and “zombie bank.” He covers things we say or hear every day―such as GDP, the IMF, credit, debt, equity, and inflation―and explains how hedge funds work, what the World Bank does, and why the language of money has gotten so complicated. Along the way he draws on everything from John Maynard Keynes to the Wu-Tang Clan, Friedrich Hayek to Thomas Piketty, The Wealth of Nations to Game of Thrones.
A primer, a polemic, and a reference book, How to Speak Money makes economics understandable to anyone. After all, “money,” as Lanchester writes, “is a lot like babies, and once you know the language, the rule is the same as that put forward by Dr. Spock: ‘Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.’”

How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say―And What It Really Means

"A vibrant piece of fiction, pulsating with events and emotions…Seems destined to be read a hundred years from now." ―Martin Rubin, Los Angeles Times
Each house on Pepys Road, an ordinary street in London, has seen its fair share of first steps and last breaths, and plenty of laughter in between. But each of the street’s residents―a rich banker and his shopaholic wife, a soccer prodigy from Senegal, Pakistani shop owners, a dying old woman and her graffiti-artist son―is receiving a menacing postcard with a simple message: "We Want What You Have." Who is behind this? What do they really want? In Capital, John Lanchester ("an elegant and wonderfully witty writer"―New York Times) delivers a warm and compassionate novel that captures the anxieties of our time―property values going up, fortunes going down, a potential terrorist around every corner―with an unforgettable cast of characters.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by LANCHESTER, John. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by LANCHESTER, John

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by LANCHESTER, John. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Mr. Phillips

Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay

Fragrant Harbor

Family Romance: A Love Story

The Debt to Pleasure: A Novel

The Debt to Pleasure

The Debt to Pleasure.

Capital: A Novel

How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say―And What It Really Means

Capital: A Novel