Hangover Square

By Patrick Hamilton

Published Jan 2010

London 1939, and in the grimy publands of Earls Court, George Harvey Bone is pursuing a helpless infatuation. Netta is cool, contemptuous and hopelessly desirable to George. George is adrift in a drunken hell, except in his ‘dead’ moments, when something goes click in his head and he realises, without doubt, that he must kill her?

In the darkly comic Hangover Square Patrick Hamilton brilliantly evoked a seedy, fog-bound world of saloon bars, lodging houses and boozing philosophers, immortalising the slang and conversational tone of a whole generation and capturing the premonitions of doom that pervaded London life in the months before the War.

A masterly novel. You can almost smell the gin.

Spectator