Sadie Jones' Small Wars Knopf, 2009 All three of 2010's Orange Prize nominees discussed here already (Lorrie Moore's At the Gate of the Stairs, M.J. Hyland's This is How, Rebecca Gowers' The Twisted Heart) were relatively quick reads for me. Sadie Jones' Small Wars? It took me a full week
If you read Rebecca Gowers' first novel, When to Walk, you've been introduced to Ramble: she's not easy to know but she's at the heart of Gowers' debut so you'll have made her acquaintance. Those readers who want to make friends with the characters they're reading about, likely didn't even
M.J. Hyland's This is How (Canongate, 2009) This is not the first of M.J. Hyland's novels that I've read. How the Light Gets In (2004) is the story of a Sydney teenager transplanted into an American family as an exchange student and Carry Me Down (2006) is the story of
A Gate at the Stairs Lorrie Moore Bond Street Books, 2009 Earlier this year I picked through Self-Help, Moore's first collection of short stories, largely drawn from her Master's thesis, because somewhere I came across a reference to her story "How to Become a Writer", which made me think that
Arguably the best novel of the trilogy, for having been nominated for Orange Prize in 1996 and having won the Booker that year, there was no question in my mind as to whether I would read on following Regeneration and The Eye in the Door. Despite my habit of resisting war
