this was somewhat confusing to begin with as there are fequent shifts in the narrator and it takes time to work out the relationships between people. She never wanted it, she’s not coming today, and… we know there’s more to the story than marital resentment. This year was also the inaugural Orange Prize for Fiction (known today as the Women’s Prize For Fiction), set up to counter the evident male domination of the Booker shortlist over the years.

He was first shortlisted for the Booker in 1983 for the magnificent Fenland novel Waterland, at which point he was being feted as one of Granta’s famous “Young British Novelists” alongside the likes of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro.Swift's prose, with its multiple narrators and its stripped-down cockney lyricism, into the light and shadow of cinema .

Lenny, a trader on a market stall and the one with the least money to spend, would have loved to go on the kind of Sunday trip that Jack and Amy went on with the young Vince. This story evoked some vivid recollections of the often stifling and claustrophobic mores of the time. We’re all just raw meat when it comes to it, blown away like ashes on the wind (Swift doesn’t quite go so far as to mix these obvious metaphors, but both are very much present and correct! We have no more insight than the characters themselves, and come to the same dawning realizations that they do, at the same time. She didn’t marry because she had to—her pregnancy was brought to an end by a backstreet abortionist.For this is a novel that works primarily on a domestic scale – especially if you count the pub as an extension of the front room. It feels real, because it all comes out of the everyday… and although that might seem a fairly random list of themes, it will do for now. This experience is making everybody ask the big questions, however they might be moderated by blokeish asides. Which, dear reader, is exactly what happens when a missile kills all his mates in the fire party just after he’s been sent aft for more hoses. But I found the funereal tone and speed of the book rather oppressive, particularly in the second half.