Capital – John Lanchester

Capital is set in London prior to and during the 2008 financial crisis, jumping between December 2007, April 2008, and August 2008.  All of the main characters have a connection to a fictional street in Clapham called Pepys Road, a possible reference to Samuel Pepys who lived in Clapham Old Town until 1703.

John Lanchester started working on what would become his state-of-the-nation novel in 2005. While he was working on it the 2007-8 crash happened. Set in a single South London street, the novel ended up as one of the defining portraits of the human effects of a global financial crisis: almost instantaneously it felt like it had captured an era. Epic in scope yet intimate, capturing the ordinary dramas of very different lives, this is a novel of love and suspicion, of financial collapse and terrorist threat, of property values going up and fortunes going down, and of a city at a moment of extraordinary tension.

Capital uses the peculiar British fixation with property, and the resentment it can foment, to bring together a diverse ensemble of characters in classic Dickensian fashion. On Pepys Road in Clapham there’s a banker (Jones) eyeing up holiday homes as he prepares for a £1m bonus; there’s a Polish builder (Radoslaw Kaim) all too ready to indulge the interior design whims of the banker’s wife; there’s a Zimbabwean refugee (Wummi Mosaku) with a PhD working as a traffic warden; and there’s an OAP (Gemma Jones) who’s lived her entire life in the same address on the street and is now contemplating death in the house in which she was born. At the end of the street Ahmed (Akhtar) runs the corner shop.

Capital was adapted into a three-part British television series The first episode was broadcast on BBC One on 24 November 2015 and starred local Claphamite Toby Jones.