THE DAKOTA WINTERS

by Tom Barbash, Scribner, £14.99 (ebook £7.99). Available January 10 ★★★ ★★ FORMER journalist Tom Barbash grew up five blocks from the Dakota apartments in Manhattan, where John Lennon lived when he was assassinated, and has set his novel in the iconic building in the months running up to the murder.

The Dakota Winters follows the lives of the Winter family who are dealing with talk show host Buddy Winter’s return after a nervous breakdown.

Narrated by his son, back from a Peace Corp stint in Africa, having caught malaria, the novel deftly describes the milieu of Upper West Side intellectual celebrity the family moves in – including trips with the ex-Beatle – and excels in capturing a sense of time and place before gentrification and cable TV.

The heavy-handed foregrounding of Lennon’s death becomes wearing and the treatment of the assassination itself seems anticlimatic, but despite this, the book is an enjoyable insight into a lost world.