Description: In High Latitudes, the acclaimed novelist James Buchan brings his extraordinary verve and insight to a depiction of the financial chaos that followed the stock-market crash of 1987 and its effects on the lives of the wealthy, greedy, ambitious characters who people the world of London finance. As the novel opens, Jane Haddon is at the pinnacle of her career as managing director of Associated British Textiles. Although she is only in her mid-thirties, she earns more money than any other woman in Britain. Some applaud her success; others long to see her fail. Divorced for eight years from the beautiful and enigmatic Johnny Bellarmine, she is isolated in her work, lonely in her personal life, and scarred by a lifetime of self-loathing. Nineteen eighty-seven is a year of disasters - the October financial collapse, the vast oil tanker spill in Alaska - and Johnny, a partner in Lloyd's of London, is looking at bankruptcy and the loss of Wexley Park, his estate in Northumberland. As Jane's story is peeled back through a series of intricately timed flashbacks, a picture emerges of a doomed romance, of heroin addiction, of neglect and abuse; and unfolding events lead the protagonists to Alaska and Antarctica to escape reality or find a kind of personal authenticity in the "high latitudes" of the book's title.

Please Wait