Unfinished Business is humane, intimate and affecting because it explores universal themes - ageing, marriage, friendship, mortality - and celebrates beauty

The tenor of Unfinished Business feels dreamlike, fragmentary, except that the writing is also exact and alert, anchored very particularly in time and place. Better known as a cultural critic, Bracewell hasn't published a novel in 21 years. This is quite the comeback . . . The overall tone is so measured that the tragic event at the novel's climax stuns like a concussion - worse than that, because it's not even the tragedy we thought we had seen coming

This sense of innocence and wanting is what gives this eerie novel its power to move and frighten . . . Bracewell excels at this kind of shocked satire, of London's continuing grand delusions