The irresistible inheritance of Wilberforce

This is a novel that tells its story back to front, whose main character we meet when he is down on his luck, in his local French restaurant drowning his sorrows in the depths of two bottles of vintage Petrus. It hasn't taken all that long for Wilberforce, as we will only know him, to reach this point, and we see it, almost in slow motion, from the moment it begins - that one fateful day when he takes an unexpected detour into the country when he is driving home on a twilight evening.