Hornby tries something ambitious here (a novel less plot driven, more interested in the big questions of existence) and it almost works. Accept there's only the bumpiest of roads for this plot to travel on and it loses its way a bit too much. It's hard to care about big issues when they don't seem really anchored to anything, when the fiction of this work of fiction seems unfinished at the expense of what this work of fiction wants us to think about.