The Girls of Slender Means by Murial Spark
I have been struggling all year to work on an unwieldy second novel and punish myself by reading ones which are small and perfectly formed. I was directed to Muriel Spark's by a reprinted piece by the late Carol Shields (whose is equally brilliant and concise). Spark's novel is a crisp, comic and moving glimpse of the precarious lives of single women in wartime London. I consumed J. M. Coetzee's on a long train journey across Germany, heading for a writer's retreat where I later regaled the other author there with Coetzee's bleak and hilarious account of not getting down to it (life as much as writing, that is).
Youth by J. M. Coetzee
My best discovery this year has been Patricia Tyrell's , which I came across when judging a prize. More or less self-published, it is a finely drawn and unsentimental tale of a teenage girl who has grown up happily with the man who abducted her as a child, and who is prompted by a terrible event to return her to her mother. I am delighted to say that Weidenfeld are to publish it properly next year.
Lavinia Greenlaw is an award-winning poet and novelist. Her most recent collection, , was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for October 2003 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize.
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