The Champion

Charles Pemberton has lived all his life in the same, small town. It's been a good life, a safe life. Then, sauntering boldly into this privileged world comes Clark "Large" Rossiter, a working-class lad with an easy charm and insatiable ambition. Large is out to upset the established order of things. He wants it all: money, status - even revenge. But Charles and the old guard aren't ready to lie down just yet, and this probing portrait of the years between Thatcher and Blair catches an England unleashed from restraint, at war with itself and heading for a fall. This ferociously funny novel, firmly in the tradition of Money, The Line of Beauty, or, most recently, Linda Grant's They Had it So Good, is great English satire at its savage best.