The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim - Jonathan Coe

MAXWELL SIM seems to have hit rock bottom: Recently returned from an unsuccessful visit to his estranged father in Australia, and newly separated from his wife and daughter, he realises that while he may have seventy-four friends on Facebook, there is nobody in the world with whom he can actually share his problems.

Then a business proposition from an old friend, Trevor, comes his way – a strange exercise in corporate publicity that will require him to spend a week driving from London to a remote retail outlet in the Shetland Isles. But, as he drives north, the journey takes a more serious turn, leading him not just to one of the furthest points in the UK, but to the dark secrets within his own family. On the verge of losing his bearings altogether, Maxwell starts to identify more and more obsessively with the tortured figure of Donald Crowhurst – the lone yachtsman whose 1969 attempt at a round-the-world voyage ended in tragedy.

THE TERRiBLE PRIVACY OF MAXWELL SiM is a story for our times: Maxwell finds himself all at sea in the modern world, struggling to keep himself afloat when all the familiar landmarks have gone. It’s a novel with a family mystery at its core, an astute and occasionally hilarious satire on our hi-tech world, but above all a story of survival.