I just finished two novels that both take place in London and were written by demographically similar authors. The Post-Birthday World is a book that I’d read an amusingly dismissive review of (I can’t remember where; I thought it was the London Review of Books but it wasn’t) but then I saw the paperback in the train station and flipped through it and it looked pretty good. It was indeed pretty good. I can’t say that the characters really ever seemed like real people, but it was hard to put down and also thought-provoking. I liked that it moved slowly enough that the characters had a chance to mull things over. The Last Samurai was recommended to me by Rachel. I have to admit that I skipped all the parts of the book that were in foreign languages but I suppose they added to the atmosphere nonetheless. The two main characters seemed completely real, also the book was very funny. There was also some of that cool unreliable-narrator thing going on, where one of the two main characters (the adult one) seemed self-deluded. Highly recommended.