In another era, Arnold Zable might have been a librettist instead of a novelist, like Oscar Hammerstein or Arthur Laurents. His latest novel, Scraps of Heaven, opens with an overture, that borrows a great deal from the books of old Broadway musicals: an early morning scene in the back lanes of 1950s Carlton, filled with the incidental music of milk carts, the syncopated slap of wet laundry and then a woman singing, ‘Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think’.