For many pages, I wondered what this book was about. But did I mind? Not a bit: it's very funny and the characters are strongly individualised. So what is it about? The parallels will give you a clue ...
Extract
In these first few days, Daniel spent almost all his time in Crouch End. When he was back in Clapham, he took to writing the name Laura on loose scraps of paper, and hiding them in his books, to give himself the luxury of coming across them by chance many years later. When he did, he found that her Christian name - whatever its natural poetry, however great the achievements or pleasures it had provoked in the past - had become linked inextricably with catastrophe. He might as well have written Nagasaki.
