A darkly comic, lightly metafictional tale about a banker seeking love and a novelist seeking wealth amid the fallout from the financial boom and bust in Ireland. Claude Martingale, a well-paid analyst in the Bank of Torabundo's Dublin office, finds his routine upset when a man named Paul asks if he can trail Claude as research for his next novel. His creative energy sends the book in many directions, making it a little loose and lumpy, but the same may be said of Dickens, with whom real Paul also shares wit, sympathy, and a purposeful sense of mischief. --Kirkus
