Cover

Praise for Other People’s Money

Praise for Other People’s Money

Novel of the Year Award, the Spear’s Book Awards 2011

‘Written in cool, word-perfect prose … Other People’s Money is a genuine, startto-finish pleasure: deftly executed and littered with standout lines. Perhaps most striking, though, is Cartwright’s brand of satire, which is unsparing and yet somehow never cruel’

The Lady

‘A literary first – a feel-good novel about the financial crisis. Second, it is a comedy of manners, in which bankers are good and bad – as are journalists, failed actors, drop-outs and postmen … Yet in the end, though other people’s money may have been lost, other things have been gained; life goes on in this delightful novel, as it does in the world that it so gently satirises’

Financial Times

‘I love Justin Cartwright’s novels … Cartwright’s highly spiced mix of “Englishness”, high finance and low cunning, father, sons and twitches on the familial thread is quite as irresistible as his cool and impossibly laconic style’

D.J. Taylor, Literary Review

‘Very little literary fiction has been written about the financial crisis in Britain. And yet the City is of abiding interest. This is one reason why Other People’s Money strikes the reader as both original and familiar … Funny and wise’

Economist

‘While revelling in the topical details, Cartwright has created a surprisingly comic novel told from multiple points of view … Recent events give us little cause to feel warmth for bankers but Cartwright redeems the industry with humour and humanity ****’

Metro

‘This is a serious novel with a light touch … Cartwright makes the reader think and feel, one mark of a good novel. Other People’s Money invites us to reflect on the way we live; and it’s thoroughly enjoyable. What more can you ask for?’

Alan Massie, Scotsman

‘A tale half comic and half cautionary—and all compelling—about the financial crisis … Witty, thoughtful, briskly paced and entertaining – a terrific novel about excess, hubris, class and the age-old (usually one-sided) tussle between art and commerce’

Kirkus (starred review)

‘Brilliant’

Kate Saunders, The Times

‘Simply the best I’ve read all year’

Irish Examiner

Dedication

For Nigel and Maria,

dear friends

Epigraph

When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill done.

– John Maynard Keynes, General Theory of Employment,

Interest and Money, 1936

Matisse’s studio was a world within the world: a place of equilibrium that, for sixty continuous years, produced images of comfort, refuge, and balanced satisfaction. Nowhere in Matisse’s work does one feel a trace of the alienation and conflict which modernism, the mirror of our century, has so often reflected. His paintings are the equivalent to that ideal place, sealed away from the assaults and erosions of history, that Baudelaire imagined in his poem ‘L’Invitation au Voyage’:

Furniture gleaming with the sheen of years

would grace our bedroom;