In 2006, Wilberforce is an alcoholic close to killing himself through his prolific wine consumption of four or five bottles a day. Regularly barred from the high-end restaurants he visits in search of the most exclusive and expensive vintages, Wilberforce does not appreciate that he is addicted; he views himself as a wine connoisseur, even when he wakes up in hospital from an alcohol-induced coma. From this engaging beginning, Paul Torday takes the reader back to three previous years of Wilberforce's life, in which we see the journey that transformed him from a young, successful businessman to a walking disaster area.

This novel starts off with humour and gets darker and darker as we go back through the years of Wilberforce's life. The final sentence is brutal, given everything the reader now knows will happen.

WIlberforce is a man who starts out lonely and obsessed and ends his life equally lonely and driven by a destructive irresistable desire, which he thinks fills the empty space in his heart.

By the end of the book I found it harder and harder to turn the pages.

One big quibble: Catherine is a blank and this makes it difficult to see why two men succumbed to her charms.

To be released somewhere in Cambridge or on the shelf at the OBCZ in King's Parade.

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