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
Samantha Hunt’s The Seas (2004) Picador, 2006 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) Samantha Hunt’s debut begins: “The highway only goes south from here.” You might think that this will be a linear tale. But no, by the end of the first four pages,
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
Tishani Doshi’s The Pleasure Seekers Bloomsbury, 2010 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) Tishani Doshi’s debut opens with Prem Kumar Patel, 47 years old, and his wife, Trishala, sending off their oldest son, Babo, to England, with three younger children remaining at home. The
Louise Doughty’s Whatever You Love London: Faber & Faber, 2010 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) Readers fall hard into Louise Doughty’s sixth novel. The emotional intensity in Whatever You Love is pervasive: even when the root of that intensity is character rather than
