Carol Birch’s Jamrach’s Menagerie Canongate, 2011 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) This is a true story: while being delivered to Jamrach’s menagerie near Ratcliffe Highway, a Bengal tiger escaped. “An eight-year-old boy who walked up and patted it on the nose was knocked
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
Wendy Law-Yone’s The Road to Wanting (2010) Vintage Books, 2011 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) When readers meet Na Ga, the narrator of The Road to Wanting, she is preparing a noose. She uses a longyi, a simple tube of fabric that you
Tessa Hadley’s The London Train HarperCollins, 2011 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) It’s a little like Barbara Pym with trains, this second novel of Tessa Hadley’s: the characters, even those in relationships, feel decidedly solitary. (She has written three other works of fiction
Joanna Kavenna’s The Birth of Love Henry Holt, 2010 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) The Birth of Love opens with a glimpse of three of the four characters whose perspectives fill the chambers of this second novel. In a single page, readers peek
