North London

In ‘Ward 9’, the central story of Will Self’s lauded debut collection, The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991), it is posited that a society can only contain a finite supply of sanity, and that when it comes to marbles we’re all playing a zero-sum game. His latest novel suggests a limited amount of morality must exist in a world where the avaricious prosper and the meek inherit the debts of those who live unscrupulous lives. In the milieu of the book, these debts are mainly school fees, coke bills and the cost of renting an Italian villa for two weeks every summer. The book follows the fortunes of a cast

‘The Cally’s named after an orphanage for kids from Scotland or some shit. Didn’t we learn that in school?’ So says Big Pharma (real name Devan Swaby), drill rapper from the Cally Active gang – one of the many characters populating Andrew O’Hagan’s vast and riveting Caledonian Road. The novel opens with a 59-strong cast list, representative of contemporary London society. At the heart of this web, spanning aristocracy, gangs and trafficked migrants via an oligarch and the middle-classes, are the celebrity art historian Campbell Flynn and his student and hacker protégé Milo Mangasha. As with the Cally and its links far beyond the capital, so O’Hagan demonstrates that his