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I left the novel I'd packed for London on the airplane by accident. It was my first overnight flight; blurry, I put it in the netted pocket in front of me, walked off the plane without it. That night, in a Trafalgar Square bookstore, I bought The Unconsoled, the only Ishiguro I hadn't read, which I found accidentally because someone who'd been looking at it lazily stuck it in the Ms where I was looking to see if the new Hilary Mantel had been released in England.

Dislocation and coincidence/circumstance and the uncanny, major Ishiguro themes, uncannily the very themes I'd been thinking about. Serendipitously, the perfect novel for where my head's been lately.

Elkin and Barth and Harington and Ishiguro, hand me a page ripped from any of their books, I know who I'm reading, which probably doesn't explain why The Unconsoled's narrator Ryder reminded me constantly of Elkin's Bobbo Druff and Barth's Ebenezer Cooke. Or it does.