Molly Guinness

Giles Wareing, a freelance journalist, is days away from his 40th birthday, pretty sure he has gout and otherwise minding — well, monitoring is perhaps more accurate — his own business, typing ‘Giles Wareing funny/brilliant/clever’ into search engines. When a perverse impulse leads him to try some less flattering adjectives he discovers the Haters: ‘A lifetime of inchoate paranoia gelled.’ On a specially dedicated chat site every article he writes is held up to scorn and ridicule and, worse still, psychological analysis. This is enough to accelerate anyone’s midlife crisis, and Wareing’s progresses with delightful precipitation.