When We Were Rich

by Tim Lott

The brilliant new novel from the author of  The Last Summer of the Water Strider

‘A sharp and very funny portrait of a brash era which is also a surprisingly tender take on flawed masculinity.’  Sarah Hughes , i paper

‘What a terrific novel - wickedly sharp, wildly entertaining - I was gripped from start to finish. With its twisty plots and interwoven characters it paints a vivid portrait of a crucial decade. It's laugh-out-loud funny, too. And with property porn thrown in, what's not to like’  Deborah Moggach

Millennium Eve and six people gather on a London rooftop. Recently married, Frankie Blue watches with his wife, Veronica, as the sky above the Thames explodes into a kaleidoscope of light. His childhood companion, Colin, ineptly flirts with Roxy, an unlikely first date, while another old friend, Nodge, newly ‘out’, hides his insecurities from his waspish boyfriend.
 
New Labour are at their zenith. The economy booms, awash with cheap credit. The arrival of the smartphone heralds the sudden and vast expansion of social media. Mass immigration from Eastern Europe leave many unsettled while religious extremism threatens violent conflict.
 
An estate agent in a property boom, Frankie is focused simply on getting rich. But can he survive the coming crash? And what will become  of his friends - and his marriage - as they are scoured by the winds of change?
 
When We Were Rich  finds the characters introduced in Tim Lott's award-winning 1999 debut,  White City Blue , struggling to make sense of a new era. Sad, shocking and often hilarious , it is an acutely observed novel of all our lives, set during what was for some a golden time - and for others a nightmare, from which we are yet to wake up.

‘Wickedly funny and deeply humane. I loved this book’  Sadie Jones

‘Tim Lott revisits the years between millennium fever and the financial crisis, and brings this already long-lost era back to life in a novel every bit as evocative and compelling as we would expect from this prodigiously gifted author’  Jonathan Coe

Praise for  The Last Summer of the Water

'I was very moved by  The Last Summer of the Water Strider , which is both  exquisitely specific  to time and place and  universal in its examination of humanity, grief  and the bizarre prisons that people build for themselves - and one another.  Funny, fascinating, mysterious and provocative'  Sadie Jones, author of  The Outcast

'Great storytelling and superb characterisation.  Very few writers can evoke quintessential Englishness in its myriad forms like Tim Lott. I loved it'  Irvine Welsh

'Lott is excellent  when it comes to the psychology of a grieving adolescent'  Observer

432 pages, Paperback

Published April 16, 2020

About the author

Tim Lott is the author of seven novels and a memoir, The Scent of Dried Roses, which won the PEN/J.R. Ackerley Prize. White City Blue won the Whitbread First Novel Award and his young adult book Fearless was shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Book Award. Tim lives with his family in north-west London.

Reviews

[SueKich · Rating 2 out of 5]

The new millennium and hindsight's 20/20 vision.

Tim Lott joins the ever-increasing band of novelists to give us his view of Brexit, the current State of the Nation and what led us into this not-so-merry mayhem.

A medley of predictable thirty-something friends provide the various vantage points: the ambitious estate agent, the gauche guy and his unlikely new girlfriend, the newly out gay guy and his New Labour boyfriend. We join them on New Year’s Eve 2000 and as we hurtle towards the 2008 financial crash, the gathering cloud of the referendum hovers menacingly above everything.

This novel and its characters have all the subtlety of a political cartoon – but unfortunately, none of a true satirist’s wit or insight. The benefit of 20/20 hindsight is truly a marvellous thing.

My thanks to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for the review copy.

[MisterHobgoblin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I suspect that Tim Lott is a misunderstood man. He writes about grotesque characters in a sympathetic way and people imagine this is because he wants the characters to be admired.

In When We Were Rich, we re-encounter the characters from White City Blue - four lads living in and around the White City estate in West London. Frankie Blue is an estate agent; Nodge is a taxi driver who has recently come out as gay; Colin is a computer geek; and Diamond Tony is persona non grata following an incident on a golf course.

Picking up almost immediately from the end of White City Blue, we follow these characters and their newly found partners from the eve of the false Millennium (the real millennium started in 2001); through the boom years of the New Labour project and into the Global Financial Crisis of 2008.

What Tim Lott does, seemingly effortlessly, is capture the atmosphere around major events and show how ordinary people responded to them. He holds up a mirror to ourselves and if we don't like what we see, we have only ourselves to blame. In When We Were Rich, we see the naked greed around the London housing market. We see people who believe they deserve the wealth they have accumulated through owning property - and expect to be able to repeat the feat for ever. We see people who judge others by their income, their job, their postcode. And because we have lived through these times ourselves, we know it won't end well. It's Rumours of a Hurricane twenty years on.

I believe firmly that Tim Lott wants readers to sneer at his characters, not admire them or aspire to be them. Whether it is venal Frankie, selfish Vronky, lazy Roxy, the vain and hypocritical Fraser, the psychopathically angry Tony - they are all there to be mocked. Especially Fraser, the fifty-year old ripped EasyJet pilot - promiscuous on the gay scene while demanding fidelity from Nodge - turning up to Labour Party meetings to lament the fall of Militant. A thoroughly vile man in every way.

When We Were Rich is the perfect summation of London in the 2000s, just as White City Blue was for the 1990s and Hurricane was for the 1980s. It is an easy, enjoyable read with much humour and quite a bit to say about class struggle and karma.

Most readers will hate When We Were Rich if reviews of Tim Lott's past works are anything to go by. Their loss.

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Failure. Blatant attempt to copy the formula behind Lott’s earlier, better state-of-the-nation novel Rumours of a Hurricane.

[The Literary Shed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tim Lott’s new novel, When We Were Rich … revisits the main characters of Whitbread-winner White City Blue. Opening just before the Millennium, in Blair’s Britain, we are reunited with Frankie Blue and old mates Nodge and Colin, with Diamond Tony lurking in the background. It ends in 2008, when the world and the economy are in a completely different state.

Frankie, in 1999, is an estate agent in a booming economy with an excess of credit, Colin a computer nerd, complete with cutting edge phone and an understanding that social media is going to change the world, Nodge has recently come out and Tony’s disgraced himself. These are people of their time, bitterly funny, brutal, slightly grotesque, money and status-obsessed.

Lott’s millennial landscape is a London teetering on the edge, fuelled by expectation and uncertainty as the new century looms. New Labour is seemingly entrenched, the economy is booming, the possibilities of new technology and social media are yet to be mined; immigration and the climate are issues of note and there’s an underlying tension in the city, the feeling that everything might just go pop.

Lott’s skill as a writer is in the minutiae – his landscape vividly drawn, littered with references to brands, labels, appearance, pop culture, the descriptions sometimes so overloaded that it’s stifling. And that seems intentional: there’s no escape from this overwhelmingly surface world with so many issues bubbling away beneath.

… When We Were Rich is smart, entertaining, funny, yes, and yet it deals with issues that still burn, that remain so distressingly relevant, all these years later, in our post 9/11, Brexit mess of a world.

Read it.

See: http://www.theliteraryshed.co.uk/read...

Thanks to the publisher for a book proof. A version of this review was published as part of the virtual book tour. All opinions our own. All rights reserved.

[ReadingSlowly · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating book that tracks the life of a group of twenty-something friends as they enter the new millennium. The novel offers perceptive insights into the minds of the main characters, and is driven by their relationships (with themselves and with each other). Initially character driven, the novel's major plot event does not occur until the midpoint of the book, by which time the reader truly cares about the impact of this on the group as a whole.

Insightful, funny and poignant.

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first Tim Lott novel I have read and I have done them in the wrong order. But I will probably read the prequel some time. It was good, really got the way to riches in the noughties and how it can collapse or disappear and in that respect, reminds me of Martin Amis's Money and John Lanchester's Capital. The characters were lifelike and very plausible, with a good glimpse at their social worlds and how money worked for them. Ditto relationships, both straight and gay. I'm impressed.

[Alex Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed this one. Interesting (flawed) characters and much sparkling dialogue.

[mylogicisfuzzy · Rating 2 out of 5]

When We Were Rich follows the lives of three old school friends from Shepherds Bush, thirty years old at the start of the millennium and up to the 2008 financial crisis. It’s a novel about the changing city and society as much as it is about the characters’ relationships and growth. The story moves through some of the major events of the noughties, such as the anti-war march of 2003 and the 2005 London terrorist attack and this signposting works well, grounding the reader in time and place.

I read an ARC of When We Were Rich and my relatively low rating – 2.5 out of 5 stars - may be in part due to this being an early copy.

The novel is peppered with pop culture references too and these were somewhat problematic. I think if you’re going to be very specific with pop culture references and use them liberally, they should be correct and many references weren’t – quite a few items mentioned in the first part of the book either didn’t exist at the time or, if they did exist, were not so widely popular that Lott’s characters would have had them. They’re not exactly 'early adopters'. And this continues throughout the book. So many brands and products are namechecked and Lott may have aimed to say something about our obsession with having things and he may have also aimed at humour but for me, this wasn’t always successful. It often just felt like an unnecessary infodump. Sometimes, less is more. Hopefully, some of the mistakes might get corrected before publication, they did spoil my reading experience somewhat and I’d have rated the book a little higher otherwise.

I also wasn’t fully on board with the characters. For a big part of the book, they weren’t compelling enough. The three main characters, when seen through the eyes of wives, girlfriends or boyfriends are pretty much only seen in a negative light and characterised by what they own or want. Everyone’s behaviour and actions are predictable, signposted by a conversation or an event in a way that you know this will be significant at some point later on. It’s a shame really as the main characters are three decent blokes just trying to live their lives. The novel does get better towards the end though as Lott finally allows his characters to grow. It’s an OK book, just not a great one.

My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review When We Were Rich.

[Cassandra MADEUP BookBlog · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first thing I think that needs to be said here, is that I don’t think this is precisely a book to ENJOY? At least not in my understanding of the word. I really liked it, I found it interesting and so incredibly insightful and honest, but I wouldn’t say that I enjoy it. That implies a certain amount of merriment and fun, which this book doesn’t really seem to be aiming for.

Rather, this is an honest look at pivotal points within the society that we now have. Having read up about the book in order to write my review, I found that there was a previous book. I think that perhaps it would have been beneficial to have read this first in order to fully understand the characters individual situations, however that certainly took nothing away from the impact of this book.

The story considers reactions and changes to societal attitudes from the beginning of the New millennium up until the Economical boom and resulting crash of 2008. The book piqued my interest so much that I actually decided to read more into the subject, and I have to say I was impressed with the Authors insight and representations of what must have been mentally draining subject to recreate.

If you’re looking for a book that will engage you start to end, educate and intrigue with it’s honest interpretations of recent historical societal impacts, then you need to pick this up. The characters are believable, at times pitiable or distasteful for their honest creation, believable in many ways and because of that they’re addictive reading!

[Tony Lawrence]

This is a fitting excellent sequel, 20 years after Lott’s debut novel White City Blue, but picking up events a short time after the shock ending; the massive falling-of the White City 4. During the course of this sequel we follow Frankie Blue, newly outed Nodge, Colin, and to a lesser-extent the estranged ‘Diamond’ Tony. Lott does these books very well weaving in human lives and bigger real events - in this case the starting with the millennium celebrations, via the Blair years, the 7/7 bombings in London and ending with the crash at the end of the naughties property boom & credit bubble. Also, Lott doesn’t pull any punches, all 4 of the leads suffer their own personal demons and tragedies, and we also see a bit more from wider family and partners. Not least, you know that Frankie’s credit-fuelled buy-to-let business is doomed to fail, but Tony, Nodge and Colin have some bleak times of their own. In hindsight there is more dark than light, maybe reflecting the current political and social malaise, but still an excellent chronicle of our life and times. Here is a phlegmatic passage from trainee therapist/counsellor Veronica, which I think sums it up well, although maybe in some cases people also do cruel selfish and vindictive things;

‘We are all in the dark … If things go badly, we think we have been stupid and foolish. Sometimes we have been wise and clever. Sometimes we have been stupid or foolish. But more often or, not, it’s just luck, good or bad. Things just happen and then other things happen and there’s not much we can do about it.’

[Siobhan · Rating 3 out of 5]

When We Were Rich is a novel about London at the turn of the millennium, following a group of friends as their lives play out and head towards the financial crash. On the eve of the new Millennium, Frankie is gathered with his new wife Veronica, and his old friends Nodge and Colin, along with Nodge's cutting boyfriend and Colin's friend of a friend date. They talk about New Labour and the novelty of a phone with a camera on it. The story follows the characters over the next eight years, from Frankie's work as an estate agent during a time of cheap credit to the changing landscape of London and White City where they grew up.

The narrative weaves their lives together well and weaves London into their lives too, particularly the way in which it played a key part in the events of the 2000s. Obvious points like the 7/7 bombings and anti war march are touchstones, but so are less solid events such as dodgy letting practices. The novel uses the recent past to highlight the present, particularly elements of the housing crisis and technology, but often feels too much like just another London novel about some comfortably off people making and losing money and dealing with relationships. This was an enjoyable read, but not something that feels like it will linger in the mind.

[Kayleigh McMillan · Rating 1 out of 5]

A story about four "friends" set in the early 00s, with plenty of references on each page to prove it (the author needs to learn the meaning of "show don't tell"). It was fine but nothing about this sparked much interest, the characters were mostly boring or dislikable and I wasn't especially invested; it was mostly depressing to read. Wouldn't bother with his other books.

[Regina Dooley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a decent follow up to white city blues. l enjoyed this book there was some great comedy moments and clever lines. The ending felt rushed and predictable given the time it was set pre 2008 economic crash. Also there was too many noughts references that were necessary.

[Max Deacon-Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Funny in parts and I enjoyed the 2000s throwback. But the lack of proper chapter breaks made it feel a bit draining for me. And some of the characters seemed pretty awful people - maybe that's how things were in the 2000s 🤔

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the Uncle Peter books

[Derek Baldwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s... ok. A little reminiscent of the rotters club but not a fraction as good.

[Paul McCormack · Rating 3 out of 5]

Slightly below my expectations

[Ipswichblade · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another great Tim Lott novel following on from White City Blue, I always love how the author interlinks the story with real life events

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beginning with drunken Millennium celebrations and concluding eight years later, Tim Lott draws us into the lives of old school friends Frankie, Colin and Nodge and their partners. Through these very different characters, Lott explores the consequences of the property boom and crash, the rise and rise of gaming and what it means to be a gay man in the early 2000s. But this isn’t just a novel about a man’s world. Through the eyes of Veronica, we see what it means to be a working mother, dissatisfied with career and marriage, and through the acquisitive Roxy, for whom shopping is a passion and possessions her gods, how meaningless the material becomes.
This character driven story works because Lott’s skill at creating credible flawed people is so strong. None of them, Nodge excepted, are particularly likeable and none of them seem to grow much wiser over the decade or so of the telling. The parents make the mistakes they vow they never will; businesses fail through greed; money is carelessly won and lost; happiness is usually short-lived. Yet, the last scene in the novel points towards some sort of redemption as Frankie and his daughter, China, embrace, soaking wet, in a park. ‘We’re drowned!’, she exclaims whilst Frankie has realised that, no, they have been baptised. It has taken many years for him to understand what is truly worthwhile. Richness is not all about following the money.
As an exploration of selfishness and greed, this novel works well. Because Nodge balances the often-bleak outlook with kindness and decency, the reader is regularly reminded that people can be good. It’s just that, sometimes, this potential is lost in our collective cultural norms.
My thanks to NetGalley and Scribner for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair review.