Justin Cartwright Archives - A life in books

Trading Futures by Jim Powell: The unravelling of a betting man

When I first picked up Jim Powell’s new novel I was looking for a bit of light relief after finishing Olivia Laing’s excellent but often harrowing The Lonely City. I thought it might be a much slimmed down version of John Lanchester’s Capital or Justin Cartwright’s Other People’s Money, a post-financial crash novel, which to […]

Up Against the Night by Justin Cartwright: A South African curate’s egg

25 September 2015 / 12 Comments

It’s always tricky disentangling a writer’s life from his fiction when you know that his narrator’s biography overlaps with his own. It’s all too easy to extend that overlap as you read, difficult to draw the line. South African by birth, Justin Cartwright is the descendent of Piet Retief whose search for fertile land took

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