JUST LIKE YOU

NICK HORNBY Viking, £16.99

When Lucy, a white English teacher at a North London comprehensive and single mother, starts an affair with her babysitter, a black football coach and would-be DJ 20 years younger, their relationship is described as ‘delicate, like a houseplant, with no ability to survive out in the world’. Just Like You charts the near death and miraculous survival of the houseplant as Brexit washes over them leaving them more than ever exposed in their differences: Joseph hasn’t thought about the EU, but his parents want out, Lucy and her friends are dismayed Remainers.

Sam Leith in the Guardian found little in the novel ‘to challenge or discomfit. But why should there be?... It’s not primarily a sociological treatise or a satire: it’s a love story.’ But Joanna Briscoe in the Observer thought that ‘the metropolitan elite have rarely been so successfully pinned…and left to squirm’. She also described the book as ‘almost Tv-ready, as page after page of

‘ Just Like You is not primarily a sociological treatise or a satire: it’s a love story’

breathtakingly recognisable dialogue is laid out like a screenplay, and even texts seem lifted straight off the phone’. Claire Allfree in the Evening

Standard complained that while Hornby remained a genial scrutiniser of social mores, ‘from a sentence-bysentence point of view he’s becoming flabbier with each passing novel’. Also his attempt to capture the urban slang of Joseph’s friends was the ‘literary equivalent of dad dancing at a wedding’. But what sort of wedding do dads not dance at?