A quick glance at my bookshelves and you would think that Jane Urquhart is one of my favourite authors. I have all of her novels save one -- a couple of hardcovers purchased new -- but I have a habit of leaving them unfinished. Nonetheless, the themes she pursues in
Anne Peile’s Repeat It Today with Tears Serpent’s Tail, 2010 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) Kathryn Harrison’s 1997 memoir, The Kiss, considering the author’s four-year-long consensual relationship with her father, opens, as you might have guessed, with a kiss. “Against such backdrops, my
Emma Henderson's Grace Williams Says It Loud Sceptre - Hodder & Stoughton, 2010 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) At first the cover might seem gimmicky, but now, having read Emma Henderson’s first novel, I realize that it’s the perfect way to summarize the
Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion Knopf, 1987 I first read this as a teenager. I’d already been reading a lot of adult literature, even if I was still regularly re-reading childhood favourites like the Anne books and still discovering some classics like K.M. Peyton’s Flambards stories and
Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) Penguin, 1978 She's "goodness made interesting". That's what Irving Howe calls Tess, the main character in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Interesting is one way to put it. Not all of his Victorian readers found it so however. His religious skepticism and his
