The book is a historical and moral novel. Her action is located in London in the winter of 1978-1979. When the winter of the United Kingdom strikes Poland, the "sick man of Europe" is experiencing mass strikes and the ubiquitous crisis.
There are two types of narratives in the novel: the third and first-person narratives. The first person speaks to twenty-year-old Candice, who runs a notebook with notes to prepare her to play the role of Richard III in Shakespeare's play of the same title.
Although Candice most often appears on the pages of the novel, I would not call her the main character. It's not Margaret Thatcher or musician, John Jones. The theme of the novel is the title Shakespeare's "winter of dissatisfaction." The author presents problems with which the British had to face in the winter of 1978-79: general strike, problems with commuting, poor supply of shops, constantly growing number of unemployed, and the ruling party trying to calm down the population, unable to admit defeat. "Crisis? What crisis? ", The prime minister replies to the journalists' question. This lapsus is used by the Thatcher party, which starts an aggressive campaign built on the dissatisfaction of the population. The conservative party uses the slogan "make Britain great again", a slogan that will soon be used by Reagan applying for the office of the President of the United States, and who is us - people living in 2018 - also well known.
It is also a story about youth, its insecurities and fears. The book makes us aware of the "generation of millennials" that young adults in Britain in the late 1970s had similar concerns about the future as we did. Candice from time to time remembers the sad saying of local youth: "no future".
The novel has been divided into many very short chapters (usually 5-6 pages). Each of them is like a snapshot of the gray everyday life of the country in a crisis. I think that their shortness also reflects the nervousness and uncertainty of those times. The chapters have been titled in an unusual way, because with the rock titles of English songs from this period, which very well reflect the spirit of the era. They are like a rock history lesson. It seems to me that you can read a book while listening to songs, because the length of the song should correspond to the reading length of the chapter (but I did not succeed because the music distracted me too much). For me, however, such short families were a big downside, because I was easily distracted by them, and each chapter concerned a slightly different thread.
The book is interesting, but not exceptional. The cover description actually reveals everything that will happen in the novel. I missed a thread that would catch me in the book, because (as I wrote above) it is primarily a collection of snapshots of Britain's everyday life in crisis and a brief debate on power (fragments of Richard the III and Margaret Thatcher).
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