Nearly three years on from the end of the pandemic and the exhausted genre of Covid fiction gets a late refresh from Alan Bennett with his first novel in five years – a spruce and spiky comedy set in a care home. The residents of Hill Topp (“two pps”, as the lofty proprietor tartly likes to remind prospective clients) are a randy, forgetful and unforgettable bunch, whose various rituals include jigsaws and podiatry and occasionally a quick tryst in the potting shed with the handyman (sex and death have always coexisted with queasy intimacy in Bennett). But then a mysterious virus turns the daily monotone upside down. Treading a slyly genial line between the absurd, the bleak and the bathetic, Bennett keeps the wheels of this superior stocking filler furiously turning until its surprising final pages.
Photograph Antony Crolla courtesy Profile Books
