Striking cover, no? Alice Sebold's novel was longlisted for the Orange Prize in 2003, the year that Valerie Martin's Property won the prize. A friend of mine was so excited about The Lovely Bones, that she bought it as soon as it was available in paperback, and I've
The Love Letter was longlisted in 1996, the year that Helen Dunmore's The Spell of Winter won the Orange Prize. The idea intrigued me straight away, even before I saw the 1999 film of the same name: a love letter addressed and signed ambiguously, discovered by a 42-year-old
If I could add up all the hours that I spend deciding what to read, I'd've read through Proust and Ulysses and Melville and Barshetshire and Les Mis a million times. At least. So you can see why I've spent an untoward amount of time thinking about what
Fourth Estate, 2004 Antony Wild's Coffee: A Dark History One of the coolest bits of Antony Wild's work is waiting for readers in the appendix: The Find at Kush. And what is it? Well, this is non-fiction, right? So it's hardly a spoiler to say that they found
Jaspreet Singh's Chef Vintage Canada, 2008 Kirpal is on the train when he overhears a child ask her mother what people miss most when they die. He thinks, food. "We miss peaches, strawberries, delicacies like Sandhurst curry, kebab pasanda and rogan josh. The dead do not eat marzipan. The smell
