Caledonian Road

A Novel

By: Andrew O'Hagan

Narrated by: Michael Abubakar

Length: 22 hrs and 51 mins

Publisher's summary

Finalist for the 2024 Orwell Political Fiction Book Prize • Sunday Times bestseller • One of The Guardian’s Best Books of the Summer • Named a Best Book to Read in 2024 by The Independent and Harper’s Bazaar • One of the Globe and Mail's most anticipated books of 2024

A biting portrait of British class, politics, and money told through five interconnected families and their rising—and declining—fortunes.

Campbell Flynn, art historian, professor, and fêted fixture of the literati, always knew that when his life came crashing down, it would happen in public—yet he never imagined that a single year in London would expose so much.

He’s never taken other people half as seriously as they take themselves, which is the first of his mistakes. The second is a new project: opportunistic and precisely calibrated to rake in a fortune. Riding on the high of a best-selling biography of Vermeer and fielding more inquiries and requests than he has the time to pursue, Campbell has nevertheless still not managed to shake the question of money. The fact of his quiet loan from an old friend now embroiled in scandal makes the ever-present worry feel even more pressing. His unflappable agent, Atticus; his steadfast wife, Elizabeth; his sister, Moira, crusading parliamentarian for the poor; his well-off, self-absorbed adult children, Angus and Kenzie; and all the outward trappings of success can’t conceal that something in his life is off.

As Campbell becomes increasingly entangled with a brilliant student, convention-smashing and working class, like he used to be, he feels he’s been given a second chance to embrace the changes in society that frighten him, even as he sees trouble brewing for his family and friends. Campbell’s personal quest takes him down darker roads than he could have imagined, and all his worlds—the art scene and academia, fashion and the English aristocracy, journalism and the inter-net—collide in spectacular fashion, culminating in one shocking night on Caledonian Road.

©2024 Andrew O'Hagan (P)2024 McClelland & Stewart

Critic reviews

Finalist for the 2024 Orwell Political Fiction Book Prize • Sunday Times bestseller • One of The Guardian’s Best Books of the Summer • Named a Best Book to Read in 2024 by The Independent and Harper’s Bazaar • One of the Globe and Mail's most anticipated books of 2024

"Everything is connected in this teeming, gripping, horrifying panorama of British society. In the tradition of Fielding, Dickens, and Orwell himself, the novelist gets everywhere: slipping into the Old Bailey, inviting himself to the polo, sharing a Mayfair magnum while taking notes. And, true to that tradition, Caledonian Road is absolutely contemporary: it gets to work in a world of branding and media spin, of hacking and cover-ups. It asks where the money is coming from, and who knows what, and how chasms of inequality are widening between people passing on the same London pavement."
—Alexandra Harris, Chair of the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction panel

“An epic way-we-live-now social novel set in a rapidly corroding London. . . . O’Hagan shares [Tom] Wolfe’s gift for delivering a panoply of unique characters. . . . There’s no doubting the scope of [O’Hagan’s] ambition; when future generations seek to understand post-pandemic Britain, this will be one of the first places they look. A sprawling critique of so-called polite society.”
―Kirkus Reviews

“[Caledonian Road] is a big book, in every sense of the word. Clocking in at just under 650 pages and featuring sixty characters from all walks of society—including immigrants trafficked across the border, politicians, gangsters, and minor royals—Caledonian Road is a sprawling social novel that harks back to the work of Balzac and Dickens while never feeling less than completely contemporary.”
—Globe and Mail