The Far Horizon

For decades, Dominic Iglesias served his bank with the kind of quiet fidelity that society rewards with indifference. Now retirement has arrived, and with it, an unbearable freedom he never learned to want. As twilight settles over Trimmer's Green in suburban London, this middle-aged clerk stands at the edge of everything he never became, a husband, a father, a man who chose something, anything, for himself. The world has moved on without noticing his absence, and he is left to confront the devastating possibility that a lifetime of duty amounts to very little. Lucas Malet writes with surgical precision about that particular English agony: the suppressed longings, the respectability that calcified into prison. This is a novel about what it costs to live correctly and arrive, at the end, with nothing but time to wonder why. It pierces through the quiet desperation of class and expectation, asking whether a life well-lived requires something more than absence of failure.