Dream children / A.N. Wilson

Wilson updates Nabokov's Lolita with inspiration from theoreticians as far-flung as Kant and Lewis Carroll. Oliver Gold, an enervated intellectual, moves into a London home. He is the pet hermit of the household, which comprises a name-dropping widow, her lesbian daughter, the daughter's lover, the daughter's own very young daughter, and an Austrian au pair. Oliver's attraction to the child plays out across several years until she approaches her tenth year and he resolves to find a decent way to let both her and himself out of the affair. He decides upon marriage as a suitable escape, choosing a brittle and tiny American as a suitable fiancée, but he is panicked by the disappearance of his indiscreet journal. Two surprise denouements are packed into this small but powerful volume, in which the only misstep is the very British vocabulary of the American characters. Provocative and timely, interlarded with both eternal philosophical quests and contemporary courtroom issues, this promises to have popular appeal as well as to uphold the author's considerable literary reputation.