A Calling For Charlie Barnes

Joshua Ferris

Viking £16.99

The eponymous hero of Ferris’s fourth novel is an American Everyman. With multiple wives and children, and a catalogue of get-richquick schemes, Charlie Barnes is unwavering in his pursuit of the American Dream – until the 2008 recession and pancreatic cancer intervene. The narrator is Barnes’s son, a novelist whose narrative is inventive and witty, tender and wise. It’s a portrait of life, love and death, and much else besides.