A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks

London, the week before Christmas, 2007.

Seven wintry days to track the lives of seven characters: a hedge fund manager trying to pull off the biggest trade of his career; a professional footballer recently arrived from Poland; a young lawyer with little work and too much time to speculate; a student who has been led astray by Islamist thinking; a hack book-reviewer; a schoolboy hooked on skunk and reality TV; and a Tube driver whose Circle Line train joins these and countless other lives together in a daily loop.

Sweeping, satirical and Dickensian in scope, A Week in December pieces together the patterns of modern urban life to create a thrilling state-of-the-nation novel.

Sebastian Faulks is best known for his war novels so A Week in December is a wholehearted departure from his usual theme. As the blurb says, this book takes us on a short journey weaving through seven lives in London in the lead up to Christmas.

What is typical of Faulks, though, and which is exemplified impressively in this book, is that he is meticulous in researching the details of what he is writing about. As a lawyer, I am often irked by authors’ small inaccuracies in depicting the lives of my fictional colleagues but Faulks is spot on with every detail, even down to the law slang. (This is probably helped by the fact that his brother is a senior barrister in London but I was still impressed and pleasantly surprised by the accuracy.)

My knowledge of the legal profession meant I was more interested in the lawyer’s plotline than I was in the hedge fund manager’s. This character is trying to create a career milestone for himself and was no doubt trying to do something very clever with the numbers on his screen but my scant knowledge of hedge funds meant that Faulks’s meticulously detailed description of his job was largely lost on me.

All of the other characters fall somewhere in between and are focused on familiar things: getting through those last few days at work before Christmas, planning parties, worrying about whether to invite so-and-so’s new partner and so on. Faulks expertly weaves these stories together, many of them connected by no more than a thread. It is this technique that I took to be the Dickensian aspect mentioned in the blurb.

A Week in December depicts the perpetual movement of London. Nothing ever stops; there is always something to do or somewhere to be – the Circle Line is a good metaphor for this. To Londoners, this is so familiar, and that familiarity would make me recommend this book to all Londoners or anyone wishing to get a sense of what London is like from the inside.