Hampstead is so popular a literary setting that it has its own genre – usually associated with the delicatessen-loving, extramarital sex-having liberal elite. Until now, journalist and author John Lanchester had resisted the siren call of the Hampstead novel. The eponymous Mr Phillips (2000) lived in a suburban semi under the Heathrow flight path, while Lanchester’s 2012 state-of-the-nation novel Capital was set on a fictional road in Clapham.
Its cover may feature a spiked martini olive, but Look What You Made Me Do is a Hampstead novel with a twist. It is narrated by Kate – a fiftysomething woman who lives in the neighbourhood with her bumptious architect husband, Jack (whom she insists is an introvert). The pair are a classic of the genre – Kate volunteers in a prison and co-founded a group “to object to NIMBY objectors to a halfway house”, while Jack renovates penthouses for Qatari investors but identifies as a Marxist.
