Deaf Sentence
By David Lodge
Harvill Secker £17.99, 304 pages
FT bookshop price: £14.39

David Lodge is the most self-knowing of novelists. If the protagonist of Deaf Sentence often seems to be reporting on the author’s own life, you can be assured this is deliberate. Like his creator, Desmond Bates is a retired professor and suffers from high-frequency deafness. He visits his 89-year-old dad in the south London enclave where Lodge grew up and references books by his Birmingham writer-friends, such as Jim Crace. All the art is in the invisible – or maybe that should be inaudible – moments when Lodge and Bates go separate ways.