Everybody’s Fool picks up roughly a decade since we were last with Miss Beryl and Sully on New Year’s Eve 1984.

The irresistible Sully, who in the intervening years has come by some unexpected good fortune, is staring down a VA cardiologist’s estimate that he has only a year or two left, and it’s hard work trying to keep this news from the most important people in his life: Ruth, the married woman he carried on with for years; the ultra-hapless Rub Squeers, who worries that he and Sully aren’t still best friends; and Sully’s son and grandson, for whom he was mostly an absentee figure (and now a regretful one).

We also enjoy the company of Doug Raymer, the chief of police who’s obsessing primarily over the identity of the man his wife might’ve been about to run off with, before dying in a freak accident. Bath’s mayor, the former academic Gus Moynihan, whose wife problems are, if anything, even more pressing. Then there’s Carl Roebuck, whose lifelong run of failing upward might now come to ruin. And finally, there’s Charice Bond -a light at the end of the tunnel that is Chief Raymer’s office - as well as her brother, Jerome, who might well be the train barreling into the station.

Filled with humour, heart and hard-luck characters you can’t help but love, Everybody’s Fool is a crowning achievement from one of the great storytellers of our time.