English Settlement — D.J. Taylor

A thirty-something, would-be master of the universe tries to reinvent himself in London in this hip and hilarious novel about ambition, family, missed connections, and Anglo-American relations

It is the late nineties. The Iraqis are in Kuwait and the former decade's financial bubble has burst. From his high-backed swivel chair in an eight-foot cubicle on the sixth floor of a London management-consulting firm, Scott Marshall prays he can survive the coming carnage.
 
The son of an inveterate Anglophile, Marshall moved to England when his former employer -- Manhattan's Hassenblad Consultancy -- went belly-up. With the optimistic wine- and money-flowing days of Reaganomics vanished into a sinkhole of blighted hope and stalled aspirations, Scott is desperate to hold on to his job amid massive layoffs. He is meanwhile dealing with a girlfriend hiding a nasty secret; an embattled football club that conceals a wellspring of deceit and subterfuge; and the reappearance of his father, whose ill-timed visit unleashes a swarm of ghosts from the past.
 
From Wall Street to Belgravia, English Settlement is a novel about manners, money, morals, and national identity on both sides of the Atlantic.