Mr. Phillips wakes on a Monday morning in his modest, nearly mortgage-free house, in the bed he has contentedly shared with his wife of nearly thirty years (though to be honest, at night he lies beside her and dreams of other women), ready to face another ordinary day. Except that this day is not ordinary, for on the previous Friday, Mr. Phillips was summarily sacked. Unable to deal with this disaster—unable even to tell his wife—Mr. Phillips rises at his usual hour and prepares himself, as he has done his entire working life, for the job he no longer has.

Dressed for work with no work to do, Mr. Phillips wanders the streets of London, seeing the world as if for the first time. What he sees triggers memories: some are improbably funny, some deeply affecting, and all gradually build a portrait of a decent man who only forty-eight hours before knew exactly who and what he was—husband, father, son, valued employee, home owner—and on this day wonders who and what he can become.

It is John Lanchester’s great gift as a writer that, using the bits and pieces of Mr. Phillips’s past, he compresses into this short novel a fully experienced life and, in the process, makes him a kind of Everyman for our times.