Extracts from The Dream of the Decade	RETAILERS CLICK HERE
Book 1 - The Dream of the Decade	Search within the book
Book 2 - Reproach	Google Book Interior Search
Book 3 - A Taste of Money	Review in Middle East Times
Book 4 - Good Morning, Britain	ALL INQUIRIES: email edvictor@icmail.net
Book 4 - Yugoslavia chapter from Good Morning, Britain

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There are great novels about cities. And The Dream of the Decade is one for London. Whilst Peter Ackroyd infamously produced a biography of the city, not since Colin MacInnes has a city been so dissected. In Afshin Rattansi’s debut, London is the new London of the 1980s and 1990s, ever dark and ever Dickensian still. But there are new aspirations and new obstacles and new tragedies.

In prose redolent of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Richard Yates, this is a very English novel nevertheless and one that any visitor to London should read. Just as any visitor to Los Angeles would be lost without Mike Davis’ City of Quartz, so Dream of the Decade is essential for a tourist and habitué alike.

In the title-novel (there are four in this publication), a man who has fought over the odds is having Willy Loman crises. He is alone, living at the top of one of London’s fine Hyde Park hotels. The novel opens ahead of the Tsunami in Asia in another century as one of his girlfriends writes of the discovery of these notes. It switches to Los Angeles but then the curtain rises up on the new swanky London of the late eighties.

It is as if a premonition and like in Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, though written with more style, the protagonist falls from grace, sitting in an expensive car that kills one of the burgeoning homeless in London’s Soho.

From there, he falls, as if floor by floor and the swankiness of late-eighties London is put into perspective as he meets two strong women that teach him and betray him.

The novels that follow examine the seamier side to London – poorer, less glamorous lives that are hit by terrorism as much as by aspiration and the rocketing value of property prices.

The final book is a Swiftian masterpiece about the new importance Londoners give to something called “media” and Rattansi charts the ludicrously unprepared journalists in a big television station explaining London as well as political conflagrations in Ireland and Yugoslavia to a hidden public.

Book Statistics
Title:             The Dream of the Decade
Subtitle:        The London Novels
Author:         Afshin Rattansi
ISBN:            1-4196-1686-2 
LCCN:          2005909384
Category:      Fiction
Length:         622 pages
Retail Price:  $21.99
Binding:        5.25” x 8” trade paperback
Illustrations: Line Art and Photographs

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