Published when Adam Thirlwell was still in his twenties, Politics arrived with the sort of literary fanfare usually reserved for much older writers.

It is a novel obsessed with sex, narration, failure and embarrassment, but also with the question of how stories themselves work. The result is a book that feels equally indebted to Milan Kundera, Philip Roth and the comic European tradition of the digressive novel.

The plot begins simply enough: a love triangle involving Moshe, Nana and a friend named Anjali. From there, the novel spirals outward through confession, commentary, footnotes, philosophical asides and deliberate narrative detours. Thirlwell's narrator is rarely content to tell a story straightforwardly; instead, he constantly interrupts himself, second-guesses his own methods and treats fiction as something alive and unstable.

What makes Politics memorable is its mixture of intellectual playfulness and genuine emotional awkwardness. Beneath the irony and formal games sits a novel about desire, jealousy, self-deception and the impossibility of fully understanding other people. It remains one of the more distinctive British debut novels of the early 2000s and an intriguing precursor to much of the self-conscious literary fiction that followed.

First edition hardback published by Jonathan Cape in 2003. Good condition with unclipped dust jacket, light shelf wear and a clean, tight interior.