Brown’s slender text presents contemporary Britain from the perspective of an apparently successful female black banker. However, given the immensity of history, the perniciousness of the class system and the irradicable vestiges of racism, success is always a relative term. Something the narrator grapples with as she heads to her posh boyfriend’s parents’ country estate for a weekend. In modern Britain, the dragnet of the past will always drag you down. The novella is discursive, composed of moments, thoughts, fears, rather than seeking to construct a complex narrative. Instead, we wander through the highways and byways of the narrator’s mind. Dealing with issues ranging from reparations paid to slave owners to cancer to what it’s like to sit on train puling out of London into the wilds.
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