Small-time finance journalist Matthew Prior gave up his day-job and gambled everything on setting up a website offering financial advice ... in witty blank verse. Then he woke up one day in the middle of the worst crisis since the 30s with no business, a shedload of debt, a lot of guilt and a great deal of suspicion about his wife who spends her time flirting online with her childhood sweetheart - a real guy with a real, man's job. So when Matt's offered some high-grade dope, and finds he can sell a little bit of it on, he thinks that maybe this is where the future lies...

As Matt battles to save his marriage, his children's future and his sanity too, The Financial Lives of the Poets becomes a hugely funny but heartfelt novel about how we can reach the edge of ruin - and pull back.

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“Lisa is not someone who would stray from a marriage lightly but I see why now, because I know exactly what she’s attracted to — confidence, security, strength, stability — all of which Chuck has, none of which is exactly seeping from my pores these days. He stops in the aisle of how-to books and clicks his tongue as he runs his hand across the spines of books that show how to do simple electrical work and how to repair a carburettor and how to fix a clogged sink and how to build a porch and how to stain your fence and, finally, how to build a tree fort. This long bookshelf seems taken directly from my insecurities—an entire library of things I cannot do. In the next aisle of this hell-library would be books about how to manage your billions and what to do with your foot-long penis."

“Here is my lightning quick assessment of my enemy’s strengths, relative to mine: (1) Chuck is taller. (2) Chuck is a few years younger and clearly in better shape. (3) Chuck really does have dreamy eyes. (I heard Lisa make this claim to a friend of ours once, when we were out with another couple, talking about why we fell for our first loves and Lisa said, “His eyes. Chuck had dreamy eyes.” Sadly, it’s true—a
couple of dreamy blue orbs jut from that Cro-Magnon skull.) (4) Chuck looks good in his Carhartt work pants and does not seem to have the middle-aged disappearing-ass issue I’ve been battling the last few years ( just being coldly objective about this). (5) Chuck is—I have to admit it—heartily handsome, those eyes astride carved cheeks over a square jaw. (6) Chuck is employed.”