Your Life Without Me

The Orwell Prize-winning author is back with a powerful, modern novel about the nature of loss and change

An explosive modern novel from the award-winning writer of The People’s Act of Love

Mr Burman is unmoored. Still reckoning with the death of his wife Ada, and struggling to understand his grown-up daughter Leila, he finds himself on a train to London, at the invitation of the police.

He is to meet Raf, a young man suspected of trying to blow up St Paul’s cathedral - and a man once intimately connected with the Burman family. Have the police laid a trap?

Compelling and compassionate, this novel follows Mr Burman’s journey towards the mystery of a radical act and into the true nature of his own family. It asks what a person leaves behind when they’ve gone, and how much of the past we can carry with us into the future.

“James Meek is one of our most consistently brilliant and thought-provoking writers. This is his best novel yet - a dark and unsettling meditation on marriage, fatherhood and architecture. Every page rings with deep truth” Alex Preston

“James Meek is a master of the art of the stealthy narrative, and his keen intelligence and alertness are evident on every page of his new novel as he juxtaposes the ordinary, unsolvable tragedy of one family’s life against the greater dilemma of our compromised relationship with the modern world. Reading Your Life After Me is like watching a glass slowly turning to reveal a truth that is at once uncomfortable and heart-breaking” Rupert Thomson

“James Meek’s Your Life Without Me follows a retired schoolteacher as he tries to discover whether it was his influence that landed a favourite former pupil in prison for a radical act of destruction. In the process, Mr Burman starts to understand his own dysfunctional family dynamics in a novel that is a profound and unsettling take on modern life by a writer at the top of his game.” Kirsty Lang