Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End Little Brown, 2007 One might accuse writers like Doug Harris and Joshua Ferris of trying to be clever in having chosen unusual narrative perspectives for their novels: You comma Idiot is told in the second-person and Then We Came to the End
Andrea Levy’s Every Light in the House Burnin’ Review-Headine 1994 Earlier this year I read The Long Song and I was immediately and happily absorbed by Andrea Levy's storytelling, but I was concerned that she might not hold my interest; instead my interest intensified. Similarly, if I had started with Every Light in
Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections Harper, 2001 They splotch the busy reader's bookshelf: those oversized contemporary novels that you haven't read yet. You expect Dickens and Trollope and Tolstoy to span the reading weeks, but you expect contemporary novels to be more portable, more succinct, more zip-through-able. It makes it harder
Aryn Kyle's Boys and Girls Like You and Me Scribner, 2010 One of my first favourite short story collections was Bronwen Wallace's People You Could Trust Your Life To and I loved it to bits because it felt so real. Like the text on its pages could have leapt up,
Michael Cunningham's A Home at the End of the World Picador (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 1990 Michael Cunningham forced my introduction to Virginia Woolf because I desperately wanted to read The Hours and, so, Mrs. Dalloway had to come first. The Hours has been a favourite contemporary novel ever since,
