The novel opens with Laura’s sudden disappearance after an argument with Ian. Over the following week Mark and Ian meet each night in their local to discuss where she might be. Mark has not had a girlfriend for years, partly because he has always held a not-so-secret torch for Laura. After a mammoth drinking spree and the gradual discovery of Ian’s serial infidelity, Mark is finally spurred into action. Inspired by the heroes of the war films and classic novels that run through his internal monologue, he sets off to find Laura.

As with Catch, the writing is the star of the show; Nath has a distinctive style that blends a lyrical and yet chatty stream of consciousness with flashes of magic realism. A curious and original aspect to the novel is that Mark is of mixed race and yet, in defiance of current literary trends, absolutely nothing is made of this. The struggle to be heroically masculine in the modern world is the novel’s overriding theme, and Mark and Ian are amusing and depressingly recognisable portraits of ungallant metropolitan men.

There’s no such wimpishness in Alex Preston’s novel, although Charlie Wales, the central character, probably drinks in the same pubs as Mark and Ian. This Bleeding City depicts a completely different kind of contemporary man; Charlie, a trader in a Mayfair hedge fund, has suppressed his self-avowed sensitive side, and swashbuckled through his twenties, stealing friends’ girlfriends and colleagues’ jobs, leaving a trail of destruction in his wake. He is the kind of banker (and yes, this is Cockney rhyming slang) who is embarrassed by his sweet suburban parents because they aren’t rich and who nicknames his closest workmate Coffee Teeth.

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