Capital (novel)

The book deals with multiple contemporary issues in British life including the financial crisis of 2007–08, immigration, Islamic extremism, celebrity, and property prices.

"[9] Reviewing Capital for The Daily Telegraph, Keith Miller gave it a full five stars and began by writing, "The first thing to say about John Lanchester is that a sizeable number of concerned economic illiterates have him and none other to thank for whatever portion of their sanity they managed to hang on to when the banking system went south in the late 2000s.

explained roughly what was going on in terms that even a humanities graduate could understand […] Lanchester’s was an intelligent, humorous and eminently reasonable voice among all the gibbering.

He found the book to be, "a more or less unimpeachably plausible portrait of one (fictional) street in Clapham, a popular south London 'village' where a spacious but fairly hideous Victorian house can command a price approaching a hundred times the UK's median annual income".

Miller warned against the "obvious-seeming parallels with Dickens" finding instead, "A more credible parallel is with Honoré de Balzac: like Balzac, Lanchester has the brains to relate the particular to the general; the ruthlessness to make bad things happen to good people (though good people are in short supply in Capital); the steadiness of hand to draw unpalatable conclusions (poor immigrants really do despise affluent white Londoners; some of our neighbours really do want to blow us up; we fall in love with our nannies not because they are younger and prettier than our wives but because they're kinder-hearted and more companionable); and, crucially, the courage to bore his readers a little, at times, rather than leave them underinformed".