John le Carre's "The Naive and Sentimental Lover" offers a dark and ribald send-up of both middle-class and bohemian pretensions that will astonish and delight his many fans.

Aldo Cassidy is an entrepreneurial genius. At thirty-nine, he dominates the baby pram market and rewards his success with a custom Bentley. But Aldo's bourgeois life is upended by a chance encounter with Shamus, a charismatic writer whose first and only novel, blazoned across the firmament twenty years earlier.

The two develop a passionate friendship that draws Aldo, smitten also with his new friend's luscious wife, into a life of reckless hedonism that threatens to consume them all.

''Sad, funny, captivating, and stunningly fertile, it is the most satisfying novel I have read this year.'' Sunday Express