Gabriel works in the City. He's a very successful and very rich hedge fund manager working in a high rise office block overlooking St Paul's in London.

Gabriel has been diagnosed with a brain tumour and no amount of money will find him a cure.

He decides to carry on with life as usual and tells no one. But his behaviour increasingly hints to his colleagues that something is different.

Gabriel finds himself bursting into tears for no reason, he asks his secretary about her home life (not to find a reason to sack her but showing genuine concern), and he is interested in the anti-capitalist protesters occupying the concourse outside St Paul's.

Watching life in the encampment below him, Gabriel spots a young woman playing a violin. He becomes intrigued by her and decides he wants to find out more about her. So he follows her. In doing so, he rescues her in a mugging, though he comes off worse. A friendship results but only because Gabriel lies about his real job and lifestyle.

Eventually the inevitable happens and Gabriel's lies are exposed. Will Caitlin still want to be with him?

This is a gentle read which proves an intriguing insight into the world of finance, and the super rich, but without being gratuitous or excessive. It is a romance, and a story about relationships touching on how and why we treat people as we do. It looks at the morality of our world today. But it's also a book about facing up to what's important.

Was it the brain tumour that altered Gabriel's behaviou? The author says that he was intrigued by an account of someone with a head injury whose character changed, making them a more unpleasant and aggressive individual to how they had been before, and someone whom their family members could no longer recognised. Extence says that he wanted to explore the same thing but in reverse - an unpleasant person who became much more likeable and honourable after their trauma to the brain.

But if we are faced with death, and have only a few months to live, wouldn't this make any one of us question our values and want to invest in relationships and behaviour that seem more noble?

I've enjoyed Extence's others books - The Universe Versus Alex Woods and The Mirror World of Melody Black - and want to read them again. This felt a different book to those but perhaps they are similar - he takes what could potentially be a difficult subject (autism, depression, terminal illness) and addresses it with fantasy, with humour and also with compassion and intelligence so that the reader is left having enjoyed the story but also feeling they have gained an insight into another's experience.