Ferdinand Mount's Making Nice takes place in the murky world of London PR firms, the back rooms of Westminster and on the campaign trail in America and Africa. Our protagonist is the hapless Dickie, lately the diplomatic correspondent for a London financial newspaper. He and his wife Jane, an oncologist, and daughters Flo, an aspiring ballet dancer, and Lucy, a teenager of fourteen, find themselves bound up in an ever more alarming series of unfortunate events, revolving around the shady character of Ethel (Ethelbert), founder of the dubious publication relations agency Making Nice.
With echoes of Evelyn Waugh's novel Scoop and TV series The Thick of It, as well as thinly veiled portraits of Cambridge Analytica and political personae known to many, Making Nice is a masterly take on the madness of contemporary society. Indeed, if there is one central theme to this most accomplished novel, it is the limitless human capacity for self-deception.
This is Ferdinand Mount at his very best. Making Nice is something that only a man with his intelligence, wit, perception and sense of the ridiculous could write and pull off so brilliantly. Following the critical and commercial success of his family memoir Kiss Myself Goodbye, which read at times like a novel, Mount's devoted fans will not be disappointed with this raucous and highly enjoyable work of fiction.
About the Author
Ferdinand Mount was born in 1939, the son of a steeplechase jockey, and brought up on Salisbury Plain. After being educated at Eton and Oxford, he made various false starts as a children's nanny, a gossip columnist, bagman to Selwyn Lloyd, and leader-writer on the doomed Daily Sketch. He later surfaced, slightly to his surprise and everyone else's, as head of Margaret Thatcher's Policy Unit and later editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He is married with three children and two grandchildren and has lived in Islington for half his life.
Apart from political columns and essays, Mount has written a six-volume series of novels, A Chronicle of Modern Twilight, which began with The Man Who Rode Ampersand, based on his father's racing life, and included Of Love And Asthma (he is a temporarily retired asthmatic), which won the Hawthornden Prize for 1992. He also writes what he calls Tales of History and Imagination, including Umbrella, which the historian Niall Ferguson called 'quite simply the best historical novel in years'.
