Triangulation

In Triangulation, Phil Whitaker has created an almost perfect English novel - controlled, funny, seething with sexual tension. His stolidly anglo-saxon anti-hero John forms one angle of a three-sided love affair. At the other angles are Laurance, a shooting star, brilliant and glamorous, and Helen, a pretty young girl down from the country and ripe for adventure. Meeting in their first jobs at the newly civilianized Department of Overseas Survey, their lives intertwine. John and Laurance become friends, despite their obvious differences: Laurance's career takes him to Africa, John's into the dustier reaches of the Whitehall map library. When both fall in love with Helen, three lives collide. Phil Whitaker achieves many things in this fine novel, a faultless evocation of London in the late fifties, a love story that stays in the reader's mind long after the book is finished.