To Have Nothing

In a dark night of the soul, a bourgeois citizen runs away from home: his life has been a lie, a waste, a wilful delusion. For 40 days and 40 nights he suffers and shivers alone in a derelict Notting Hill villa. Then, the inevitable. A pre-Thatcherite workers' cooperative, led by a minor aristocrat, storms the villa and lays waste his precious penance. 235 pp.