London: home to 8 million people; with a combined wealth of more than a trillion pounds; a vibrant city with a thrusting new skyline . and some really quite well -planned infrastructure. So how is it that James, Southwark Council's brightest and youngest town planner finds himself at 32, once again waiting for the 3am night bus to carry him away from yet another obscenely expensive restaurant where his university friends inexplicably insist on meeting, to his rented flat in the bowels of Crystal Palace? This is not the life he had planned for himself. Not at all.But just as James is trying to decide whether to give up on the city altogether he meets Felix, an urbane ad-man who navigates London's treacherous waters with sophisticated ease. Felix introduces James to a city and a lifestyle that he has never known, one that does not feature in the planning manuals of the Greater London Authority: a world of private clubs and members-only football boxes; of book launches, exclusive 'gentleman's venues' and bison-grass-vodka- fuelled blind dates. With Felix's help James goes back to the drawing board to re-design the kind of person he would really like to be. But how will James's master plan affect those whose lives intersect with his? And will his entry into this glossy new lifestyle come at a price'.

A sharply funny, Faustian tale of finding your feet in a morally ambiguous world, of public servants and private ambition, confidence and disillusionment, The Planner is a novel for anyone whose best laid plans have ever gone awry.