Set against the background of Thatcher's England and Ceausescu's Romania, this is the story of Tim Harker-Jones, bequeathed the task of writing the biography of a friend from the past, British novelist Philip Carston. His research leads him to Romania and a series of extraordinary incidents.

Mike Barron is not as young as he was - though he's not quite ready to accept it. Fifty eight years old, redundant, and showing all the signs of late middle age, he still manages to deceive himself into believing that he can attract women. But when the husband of his long-term lover Rosie dies he finds himself having to decide whether the affair should end and marriage begin. His answer is escape - a trial separation in a seemingly quiet seaside town. And so he begins a very strange and eventful year; a year in which to decide whether he really is grown up enough to face responsibility. This is Alan Brownjohn's third novel. The Way You Tell Them won the Author's Club Award for best first novel of its year. His second, The Long Shadows, was hailed in The New Statesman as the best fiction to come out of the 1989-90 changes in Eastern Europe and described as 'a consummate literary thriller'. In A Funny Old Year he rings the changes again with a glorious comedy.