‘A tontine only makes any sense in times of war or plague.’

So are three friends told, when a fourth’s will binds them in a tontine, a legacy payable only to the last of them to follow him in death, the last man standing. None of them want the money on those terms: How good will all the beer in the world taste over the dead bodies of your best mates? Within months COVID-19 is everywhere. Their friend also leaves a widow and daughter.

The Tuesday-Thursday gang of a Midlands golf club provides the leading players and chorus in the turbulent lives, loves, lock-ins, lockdowns and losses of old men (and some women) behaving badly over the period from 2017 to 2025.

After sometimes comic scenes of modern sexual manners and misadventures, things take a darker turn. Apart from illness, leading characters face issues including abortion, dementia, murder, sexual abuse and suicide. Who will pass this fierce examination of relationships between baby boomers and with their previous and succeeding generations, with hopes of renewal in a calmer and brighter future?

DAVID G BAILEY’s latest work features his trademark mixture of gritty realism, caustic humour and a multi-level, pacy narrative through the period from 2017 to 2025, encompassing that of the COVID-19 pandemic. It explores relationships of baby boomers with each other, their previous and subsequent generations, and what it takes to be a man in the modern world.

In David’s previous contemporary novels, Them Roper Girls (2022) traces in their own voices the lives of four sisters from their 1950s childhood, while Them Feltwell Boys (2023) follows a Roper-girl husband’s crude attempts at teenage love in counterpoint to his cynical womanising as an adult.

David debuted in 2021 with Seventeen, a football fantasy adventure novel aimed at and beyond young adults. From 2024 The Sunny Side of the House is the clear-eyed narrative of a 1960s boyhood in East Anglia, a first volume of autobiographical non-fiction in a projected series, When Life Gives You Strawberries – Memories of a Fenland Boy. The author currently lives in the Midlands.

To read more of and about David’s work, including a quarterly newsletter and new content daily comprising extracts from diaries and other writing over more than fifty years, visit his website www.davidgbailey.com.