Table Eleven

Every wedding has a table eleven. It is at the back, past the cake, and it is where the two families put the guests that neither family can place. It is built last, at eleven at night, over the final four paper squares, by a bride and her mother who have stopped caring and who say to each other: they'll be fine together. Aldo Perego walked into his first wedding by mistake, at sixty-one, on the afternoon of a retirement lunch he never attended. A young man with a clipboard could not find his name on the list and apologised to him about the table. He went back a hundred and eighty times. He never gave a false name. He never invented a memory. He paid into the envelope every time. And at the far table, among the deaf and the bored and the ones who did not want to come, he turned out to be better at it than anybody who was supposed to be there. *A novel about weddings, about the machinery underneath them, and about a man who was never once asked what he was doing at the weekend.*