The Dead of August

James and June have been happily married for seventeen years, and they live with their teenage son in a small flat in central London. James’s ‘fairytale’ celebrity obituaries are currently all the rage, and June is an up-and-coming author of violent and sexually explicit Radical Feminist fiction. Although they’ve always shared a loathing of each other’s work, recently their arguments are coming to a head. June is permanently moody, and she never seems to want to have sex any more. When James begins to suspect that she’s having an affair, his whole world is threatened with mid-life collapse. Over three successive Augusts, and distracted by scandals and colourful deaths, he drifts in unlikely directions while he tries to decide whether June can be trusted or his marriage has finally fallen apart.