In the Falling Snow
By Caryl Phillips
Harvill Secker £17.99, 320 pages
FT Bookshop price: £14.39

Keith Gordon, the son of Caribbean immigrants, faces a rocky end to his forties.

If it wasn’t bad enough being kicked out by his wife after a one-night infidelity, he’s also been suspended from his job at the council’s racial equality department after an accusation of sexual harassment. His long-held ambition to write a book on black music is coming to nothing and the Polish girl he has set his sights on doesn’t want to know. Meanwhile, his teenage son is flirting with knife gangs and his ageing father has had a heart attack.

Race, class and alienation dominate a novel that strives desperately for state-of-the-nation significance. The trouble is, there’s something so solipsistic about Keith, clutching his midlife crisis to him like a dirty old comfort blanket, that you find yourself losing sympathy. Disjointed and at times painfully slow, the book momentarily leaps to life towards its close, in a series of tight monologues from the father. But it’s a case of too little, too late.