Hornby treats the reader to some marvelously descriptive prose: «
Consistency and repetition were beginning to make the lie feel something like the truth, in the way that a path eventually becomes a path, if enough people walk along it» and «Mumbled greetings were formed in his sons» throats and emitted with not quite enough force to reach him; they dropped somewhere
on the
floor at the
end of the bed, left for the cleaners to sweep up» are just two examples.