Your Turn, Orlando!

Oliver, the modernist version of a Stuttgart Calvinist, has just saved the London-based firm Turnstyle Movies from bankruptcy. Finally married to Barbara, a clever and popular British art historian, he sees himself as a success when a company merger lets him experience the limits of what he thought he knew about business administration. Involved in all of this is a mysterious, much younger colleague, a handsome man called Orlando, who is perceived by many as Black. Indeed, his mother is a Jewish hippie drop-out. Their friendship begins in a Bloomsbury pub, and soon the two men (named after the characters of the medieval »Song of Roland«) begin to roam the millennial city, ending up in a speakeasy east of Hackney Wick. Orlando confides in Oliver, who is smitten with his friend's radical upbringing in a squat but fails to recognize the danger Orlando is in when his estranged twin brother Jason returns from a trip to Africa.

Ziegler elegantly and deftly writes of ambition and delusion, and the courage it takes to be oneself.