Books like Julian MacLaren-Ross

Hamilton shares MacLaren-Ross’s unnerving ability to make shabby social life both hilarious and devastating. George Harvey Bone is painfully devoted to the glamorous, callous Netta, while money, drink and status govern every encounter. As in Of Love and Hunger, desire is inseparable from self-abasement, and seemingly casual dialogue becomes a record of who can afford to ignore whom.

Generally regarded as Hamilton’s masterpiece, Hangover Square is darker than MacLaren-Ross but just as alert to rented rooms, unpaid bills and the comedy of trying to preserve dignity when dignity has become a luxury. Its emotional pressure is extraordinary: once you enter Bone’s consciousness, the novel is difficult to shake.

Read this for the same ruthless understanding of how quickly a man can damage his livelihood, marriage and social position. Julian English moves through a prosperous Pennsylvania town whose clubs, businesses and parties form an exquisitely calibrated hierarchy. O’Hara catches every slight, boast and evasion in dialogue of almost forensic precision.

What links him to MacLaren-Ross is not milieu but velocity: both writers compress an entire social world into reckless decisions, sexual unease and money anxiety. Long regarded as O’Hara’s finest novel, Appointment in Samarra is lean, hard and frighteningly alive. Few books are better at showing self-destruction while it still feels like ordinary life.

Magnus Mills turns badly paid work into deadpan existential comedy. An unnamed foreman is sent to supervise two stubborn labourers building fences; instructions, expenses, drinking and managerial incompetence soon develop their own implacable logic. Mills’s plain sentences conceal superb comic timing, much as MacLaren-Ross’s apparent casualness conceals exact judgments about class and dependence.

This Booker-shortlisted debut has earned a devoted cult readership because its strangeness arrives without fanfare: routine labour becomes absurd, ominous and somehow metaphysical. If you loved the vacuum-selling passages in Of Love and Hunger—especially their collision of boredom, indignity and farce—this is the modern novel you should not miss.