Unfinished Business

By: Michael Bracewell

Narrated by: Gina Murray

Length: 5 hrs and 6 mins

Publisher's summary

UNFINISHED BUSINESS focuses on an ordinary suburban office worker, fundamentally weak but always keeping his eyes fixed on some horizon where a heightened, romantic, better world must surely exist.

Faced with the regular stuff of life - work, aspiration, marriage, age, divorce, bereavement - his ordinary plight is sharpened, becoming increasingly urgent.

Having lived in a modern condition, confusing pleasure with happiness, wanting the dream to deliver, what do you do when you notice the shadows begin to lengthen on the lawn?

©2023 Michael Bracewell (P)2023 Orion Publishing Group Limited

Critic reviews

Unfinished Business is humane, intimate and affecting because it explores universal themes - ageing, marriage, friendship, mortality - and celebrates beauty (Max Liu)

The tenor of Unfinished Business feels dreamlike, fragmentary, except that the writing is also exact and alert, anchored very particularly in time and place. Better known as a cultural critic, Bracewell hasn't published a novel in 21 years. This is quite the comeback . . . The overall tone is so measured that the tragic event at the novel's climax stuns like a concussion - worse than that, because it's not even the tragedy we thought we had seen coming (Anthony Quinn)

This sense of innocence and wanting is what gives this eerie novel its power to move and frighten . . . Bracewell excels at this kind of shocked satire, of London's continuing grand delusions (Gwendoline Riley)

What a poignant, quietly devastating novel, a meditation of loss in all its flavours and pains of late middle age with a Prufrock for our times at its heart (Travis Elborough)

Michael Bracewell's masterpiece was worth the wait. Awash with luxury and regret, suffused with the pent-up emotion of The Great Gatsby and the style of a post-modern dandy, Bracewell delivers something magical (Philip Hoare)

This elegaic, understated story of a man cut adrift in London, haunted by the reality of his own decaying body, is an essay in fracturing memory, a compassionate and tender tale of searching for a better life as time runs short (Philip Clark)

For me, Michael Bracewell, in edgy, elusive works, like Present Tense, Souvenir, and now Unfinished Business, has always been engaged in something very special. A spiritual adventure which embraces all things with huge curiosity, seems present throughout his work (Alan Warner)