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.