While They Were Dying

For the Sink Set, a group of moneyed sophisticates, the distant death and destruction of the 2003 Iraq War is sobering but coincidental, a backdrop against which they shrug and carry on. In leafy Surrey, all seems as it ever was…

 —A view from America’s closest ally of a numbing, hi-tech war launched on an unproved pretext; of the consequent world-wide mass protests, murderous bombings, Government denials, political resignations, judicial inquiries, blazing headlines, impassioned speeches…

Samuel Peter Shaw’s novel blends fact with fiction to show how governments can lose their way…how nations can awake too late…how counter-argument can become futile.

Gradually, the horrors and political manoeuvrings of the war are mirrored in the disintegration of the prize-winning architect, Colly Wolfson. For him, the war becomes entwined with two earlier, lasting tragedies.

Disturbed, and with his marriage crumbling, Wolfson drifts into simultaneous love affairs—and the cracks in his life begin to spread through the Sink Set...

Step by step, they unhinge him; the obsessions of Blair and Bush invade his own obsessions; his closest friends become infected—and the path to redemption seems forever downwards…