The Dice Was Loaded From The Start

It's the summer of 2018. Max Anderson, in his early forties, has been living in Berlin for the past decade failing to become the filmmaker he was once tipped to be. But his wife's career is taking off, and with a generous relocation package on offer they've moved with their kids back to London. Not to the Hackney flat share that he left ten years ago but, somewhat bemusedly, into a rented home on Pemberton Place, a handsome tree-lined street near Hampstead Heath.
Pemberton Place is populated by couples who have lived there since the seventies, who bought their houses for a song, raised their families, and now sit on a relative fortune. The Boomers, as Max thinks of them, are cultured and urbane, full of shared stories and storied pasts, and immediately take Max under their wing. Flattered and amused by them, Max joins most evenings as they gather to drink wine and reminisce on glories past. Max is both insider and outsider, participant and observer: a position in which he feels disconcertingly comfortable.
Then eight politically mischievous Millennials move in to number an empty house on the street and upend Pemberton Place's cosy equilibrium. With the Boomers in their crosshairs they make the street a cause celebre, the front line in the generational battle of the haves and have nots. As the Millennials steadily up the ante and the Boomers try to assert their authority, Max - the street's sole Gen-X'er - realises that everyone, eventually, has to pick a side.
With wit and a propulsive pace, David Annand spins the battleground of the housing crisis into a brilliantly crafted study in intergenerational difference. The Dice Was Loaded from the Start asks: what does the good life look like? And how might we make meaning in an exhausted world?

David Annand has worked as an editor at Condé Nast Traveller and GQ. He has written for the FT, TLS, Telegraph, Literary Review, the New Statesman and Time Out. His first novel, Peterdown, won the McKitterick Prize in 2022. He currently lives in Spain.