Simon de Gex, MP, is told he has six months to live and decides to spend them arranging other people's happiness - with the detachment of a man who will not be there for the consequences. Then the diagnosis is revised. Locke was born in British Guiana and kept an architect's ledgers for ten years before his fiction took hold; this is his cleverest book and the one where the charm has a blade in it. Forty-nine plates, from Monet to Pissarro, track the book's own weather of public faces and private hours.