Jake Kerridge
Florence Calling
In Alex Preston’s novels the vast, impersonal forces of history tend not to get much of a look-in: his interest is in showing us the human factor in the great disasters of our times. This Bleeding City, the debut in 2010 with which this bond-trader-turned-author made his name, skewered and dissected the City wide boys who were ultimately responsible for the recent financial unpleasantness. In Love and War, his third novel, sheds some light on the causes of the Second World War by asking what might have made certain intelligent English people of the 1930s become fascists.
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