Felix Cooper, a recovering addict and aspiring filmmaker, desperately wants to build a proper middle-class life with his girlfriend. Leah and Natalie’s stories are told in counterpoint with those of two young men from their neighborhood. Natalie, who has accumulated prestige, money, and worldliness, thinks Leah has been duped Leah, in turn, thinks Natalie has been duped by her ambitions, though she envies her outwardly ordered life. When an unexpected visitor shows up at Leah’s door begging for money, their worldviews are drawn into sharper conflict.
Meanwhile Leah has a good degree from a good university but works in a dead-end job in a welfare-distribution office her husband just wants her to get pregnant, but she is steadily, secretly, stealing Natalie’s birth-control pills. Leah and Natalie, best friends since grade school, have grown up to be mutually suspicious of the other’s choices: Natalie has become a successful lawyer, married a perfect man with perfect chinos (“He is handsome his shirt is perfect his trousers are perfect his children are perfect his wife is perfect this is a perfectly chilled glass of Prosecco”), and has “crossed over” into the land of motherhood. Despite an otherwise equal start in life, some pull ahead while others fall behind some follow predictable paths, while others attempt to reroute their tracks.
NW follows four adults from the same rough council estate in Willesden as they each attempt to move beyond their down-and-out origins.
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