Paparazzo
He is not in the picture. He is the receipts.
Book I of 5 · Weights and Measures · Coming soon
The sequence
Weights and Measures is a five-book sequence in which each volume re-reads the one before it from an irreconcilable point of view.
The series takes its name from the language of trading standards and market inspectors: a municipal, entirely innocuous phrase for the business of converting human lives into comparable units. It states everything and gives away nothing.
Paparazzo
Terry Crake has been photographing other people's worst days since 1979. He is sixty-four, freelance, thoroughly despised, and having the best year of his working life — every tip lands, he is in the right street four times a week, and the world appears to be going quietly mad around him.
Then a colleague dies and Crake buys forty years of the man's negatives off his widow for eighty quid. In carton eleven, in a crowd outside a magistrates' court in November 1966, a man stands at the left-hand edge of the frame with his hands down and his face three-quarters away.
It is Crake. He is sixty-four in that photograph too.
So he runs the only investigation of his career into himself, using the same bins, bought doormen and patient rain he would use on anybody else.
What he finds is not about ageing at all.
The list
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