The deliciously sharp new novel from Ferdinand Mount, author of the Sunday Times Book of the Year Kiss Myself Goodbye

Ferdinand Mount's stinging satire plunges into the dubious world of London PR firms, the back rooms of Westminster and the campaign trail in Africa and America. We follow the hapless Dickie Pentecost, redundant diplomatic correspondent for a foundering national newspaper, together with his stern oncologist wife Jane, and their daughters Flo, an aspiring ballerina, and the quizzical teenager Lucy. The whole family find themselves entangled in an ever more alarming series of events revolving around the elusive Ethel (full name Ethelbert), dynamic founder of the soaring public relations agency Making Nice.

With echoes of Evelyn Waugh and The Thick of It, Making Nice is a masterly take on the madness of contemporary society and the limitless human capacity for self-deception.

Ferdinand Mount was born in 1939, the son of a steeplechase jockey, and brought up on Salisbury Plain. After being educated at Eton and Oxford, he made various false starts as a children's nanny, a gossip columnist, bagman to Selwyn Lloyd, and leader-writer on the doomed Daily Sketch. He later surfaced, slightly to his surprise and everyone else's, as head of Margaret Thatcher's Policy Unit and later editor of The Times Literary Supplement. He is married with three children and three grandchildren and has lived in Islington for half his life. Apart from political columns and essays, he has written a six-volume series of novels, A Chronicle of Modern Twilight, which began with The Man Who Rode Ampersand, based on his father's racing life, and included Of Love And Asthma (he is a temporarily retired asthmatic), which won the Hawthornden Prize for 1992. He also writes what he calls Tales of History and Imagination, including Umbrella, which the historian Niall Ferguson called 'quite simply the best historical novel in years'.

1 Champing
2 Smiley Face
3 Hi-Vis
4 The Real Greek
5 Board Games
6 On Safari
7 Flo Flown
8 Jerrybuilt
9 Ghosting
10 Spinland
11 In the Cockpit
12 The Golden Jacket
13 The Locator
14 Lost and Found
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