author chat: David Annand, The Dice Was Loaded from the Start
One of my favorite new releases I've picked up this year is The Dice Was Loaded from the Start by David Annand , which I was lucky enough to stumble into because I reviewed it for the Irish Times. The book takes place in a Hampstead neighborhood full of couples that moved there in the seventies and eighties and have watched the street gentrify, the value of their property climbing every year. Then Max and his young family move onto the street, bringing a Gen X perspective to the Boomers. He spends his evenings going between their houses, enjoying the parties and card games that they fill their empty-nester, retiree—or close to it—life with, endearing himself to them. His family can only live there because of the extremely high housing stipend afforded by his wife's bank job. There's a share house full of people in their early twenties that blooms up halfway through the book, moving into an abandoned house awaiting its renovation permits, that ruffle the feathers of the...
