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A Week in December
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A Week in December (2009) (edit title/settings)

by Sebastian Faulks (Author) (edit contributors)

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Powerful contemporary novel set in London from a master of literary fiction Structured like a thriller, A Week in December takes place over the course of a single week at the end of 2008. Set in London, it brings together an intriguing cast of characters whose lives apparently run on... read more

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  • “"Books explain the real world. They bring you closer to it in a way you could never manage in the course of the day.""How do you mean?""People never explain to you exactly what they think and feel and how their thoughts and feelings work, do they? They don't have time. Or the right words. But that's what books do. It's as though your daily life is a film in the cinema. It can be fun, looking at those pictures. But if you want to know what lies behind the flat screen you have to read a book. That explains it all.""Even if the people in the books are invented?""Sure. Because they're based on what's real, but with the boring bits stripped out. In good books anyway. Of my total understanding of human beings, which is perhaps not very great...I'd say half of it is from just guessing that other people must feel much the same as I would in their place. But of the other half, 90% of it has come from reading books. Less than 10% from reality - from living."”
    Gabriel Northwood
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  • The essential change seemed to her quite simple: bankers had detached their activities from the real world. Instead of being a “service” industry—helping companies who had a function in the life of their society—banking became a closed system. Profit was no longer related to growth or increase, but became self-sustaining; and in this semivirtual world, the amount of money to be made by financiers also became unhitched from normal logic.
    Highlighted by 22 Kindle customers
  • However, it remained necessary for these people to have—or to develop very quickly—a very limited sense of “the other;” a kind of functional autism was the ideal state of mind.
    Highlighted by 17 Kindle customers
  • meager resources the villagers occasionally slipped backward, it was not for lack of trying. But with us, here in England, it was a positive choice. We chose to know less.”
    Highlighted by 15 Kindle customers
  • Some people thought the crux of it was the invention of some credit derivative products by a few people at J. P. Morgan; but in fact, in Vanessa’s mind, the key was that society as a whole in London and New York had so lost its bearings that it was prepared to believe, with these analysts, that cause and effect could be uncoupled. To her, this social change, the result of decades of assault on long-accepted norms, was far more interesting than the quasi-autistic intellects of the people, like John, who worked in the new finance.
    Highlighted by 14 Kindle customers
  • “Yes. Maybe it doesn’t matter. I think what’s happened is that because they themselves know less than their predecessors, innovators and leaders today have remade the world in their own image. Spellchecks. Search engines. They’ve remodeled the world so that ignorance is not really a disadvantage. And I should think that increasingly they’ll carry on reshaping the world to accommodate a net loss of knowledge.”
    Highlighted by 13 Kindle customers
  • her inner resources weren’t great enough to withstand the relentless, remorseless pounding of solitude. It was like the sea; it never stopped.
    Highlighted by 13 Kindle customers
  • Most of these people just seemed to be asking for confirmation that they existed, thought Hassan. The answer was, they did. Unfortunately. Now millions of them could show each other just how empty their existence was.
    Highlighted by 12 Kindle customers
  • And somehow money had become the only thing that mattered. When had this happened? When had educated people stopped looking down on money and its acquisition? When had the civilized man stopped viewing money as a means to various enjoyable ends and started to view it as the end itself? When had respectable people given themselves over full-time to counting zeroes? And, when this defining moment came, why had nobody bloody well told him?
    Highlighted by 10 Kindle customers
  • Delete. God, life was complicated sometimes. The virtual world consumed more time than the real one: much more, in fact, since his connection with the real one was—to borrow a word he’d come across in a sci-fi magazine—asymptotic.
    Highlighted by 4 Kindle customers
  • her as his “mail-order bride,” the first Mrs. Porterfield having been superannuated.
    Highlighted by 4 Kindle customers
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First Sentence edit see section history

Five o'clock and freezing.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Sebastian Faulks (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Add the publisher.
Country: Add the country of publication.
Publication Date: 2009
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Page Count: 352

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