London, 1991. A street drunk is rushed into casualty, the apparently willing victim of a horrific traffic accident. He carries a National Insurance card, and wears an engraved digital watch. In his wallet there is a torn yellowed newspaper cutting - an obituary of the 1970s King of Muzak, Mantovani.
Once this man was somebody, had a wife, a house, a job, a child. How did he end up here? To answer that Tim Lott takes us back to 1979, to the day Margaret Thatcher came to power. It was a time before the Big Bang, before greed became good, before the hurricane.
'Rumours Of A Hurricane' is an extraordinary novel of how the life of one ordinary man is torn apart by the great upheavels of the 1980s. It's about money, property, power and families, and how people change (or can't). With it, Tim Lott stakes his claim as one of our foremost chroniclers of contemporary British lives and times - and as a novelist of real power and emotional depth.
