Whoops!

John Lanchester's Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay is the unbelievable true story of the economic crisis.

We are, to use a technical economic term, screwed. The cowboy capitalists had a party with everyone's money and now we're all paying for it. What went wrong? And will we learn our lesson - or just carry on as before, like celebrating surviving a heart attack with a packet of Rothmans?

John Lanchester travels with a cast of characters - including reckless banksters, snoozing regulators, complacent politicians, predatory lenders, credit-drunk spendthrifts, and innocent bystanders to understand deeply and genuinely what is happening and why we feel the way we do.

> Will Self

> Independent

> Janice Turner, The Times

> Jonathan Coe

> GQ

John Lanchester is a journalist, novelist and winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award. His fiction includes Mr Philips, The Debt to Pleasure and Capital. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the New Yorker, with a monthly column in Esquire.