Leila Aboulela’s Lyrics Alley Harper Collins, 2010 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) Lyrics Alley is set in 1950s Sudan, a few years before it gains independence. It’s a time of intense upheaval politically, but the focus of Leila Aboulela's third novel is personal
Emma Donoghue's Room HarperCollins, 2010 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) I’d hoped to re-read Room before writing about it here, in the context of the Orange Prize shortlist, but I still have two fresh reads from this year’s shortlist ahead of me (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
Kathleen Winter's Annabel House of Anansi, 2010 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) Like Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, it’s impossible to imagine Kathleen Winter’s Annabel being set anywhere other than the landscape therein. “In Croyden Harbour human life came
David Bergen's The Matter with Morris Harper Collins, 2010 You might have guessed that David Bergen's The Time in Between wasn't my favourite book from the Giller Prize shortlist of 2005. It wasn't that I disliked it, so much as I felt disconnected from it. It felt like a universal
