How to Make a Bomb was initially published last year in the US under the somewhat less provocative title Dartmouth Park. It’s a short novel, written in a sparse poetic style, eschewing paragraphs in favour of short sentences with line breaks and limited punctuation. Its focus is the fifty-year-old London-based historian Philip Notman, who is thrown into a deep personal crisis following a trip to a conference in Bergen. On his return he begins to struggle to pick up with his everyday life, and abandons his wife and (adult) son to head off in search of… something. Initially it seems that that something may be an affair, with the captivating Ines, who he met at the Bergen conference and initially seeks out in Cadiz. Yet relatively soon he is on the move again, this time to Crete to spend time in the dilapidated house of an older couple he helped out in Spain. He arrives seeking fulfillment of a different kind, away from the noise of modern life, and is further tempted by the allure of religion on a visit to a monastery. When all of this ultimately fails to resolve his issues, he heads back to London with a new sense of purpose, and a rather disturbing mission.

Caledonian Road is set largely on and around the titular thoroughfare, which heads northwards from near London’s King’s Cross station. Its action takes place in the very recent past, in a year’s period between early 2021 (and the ending of major Covid restrictions) and early 2022 (with Russian’s invasion of Ukraine on the imminent horizon). It’s introduced (at least in this pre-release version) by an extensive list of characters, setting the tone for the sprawling, somewhat Dickensian nature of the 600-ish pages to follow. At its undoubted centre, though, is the aging white liberal academic Campbell Flynn, clearly something of a proxy for the author. Having worked his way up in society from humble Glaswegian roots, through a combination of academic achievement and marriage into minor aristocracy, Campbell is a lecturer at UCL, a published art historian (most recently of an acclaimed life of Vermeer), sometime glossy magazine columnist and podcaster. Yet he senses shifting sands in society, and mostly the ones that uphold everything that he holds dears. Campbell, like the liberal intelligentsia he represents, is in crisis. And so, it seems, are his city and his country.