When you boil it down, nothing much happens in this engrossing little novel. It chronicles a day in the life of Mr. Phillips, an accountant who was recently laid off and, afraid to tell his wife about his predicament, spends his days wandering through London. As he moves aimlessly from bus to train, from museum to restaurant to church to bank, and then back home again, he keeps up a constant internal narrative, thinking about his past and the women he’d like to sleep with and the statistical probability of a person dying before he could cash in a winning lottery ticket.

While it doesn’t sound like a very exciting read, the story caught hold of me and kept me enthralled. Mainly, it’s the writing; the words are so precise, and the writing style rolls the reader right along with Mr. Phillips through his day. But it’s also the character of Mr. Phillips himself. At first glance, he is merely an unassuming middle-aged man, the kind of person we see around us every day, but the swirl of thoughts inside his head are a fascinating mix of the mundane and the startling – one minute he’s thinking about sex, the next he’s doing sums in his head. By the end of the book, we have not just traveled around London with Mr. Phillips – we have practically become him.