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You need know nothing about cards to relish the scabrous black comedy [...] in Tom Campbell's scintillating debut novel ... Campbell pulls off the difficult trick of putting the reader in the company of essentially unlikeable characters but keeping us thoroughly entertained. In doing so, he echoes the precise, unbridled nastiness of early 1980s Martin Amis. The pages of lean, measured prose ping with telling bons mots and, as the stakes are raised, the ruthless gamesmanship involving drugs and indecent exposure defies you not to laugh out loud even as you gasp in horror at the amorality

All the men are wondering - with the funny yet bleak dialogue of other boys' novels (Hornbyesque with a touch of Nick Cave's Grinder Man album thrown in) - how on earth they ended up teaching or in IT or poor or married to a bitch, in Reading ... a hilarious expose of the insane levels of competition between blokes