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Even the Dogs opens with the image of a man’s body being carried out of a broken-down house in the quiet days between Christmas and the New Year- but who’s the semi-homeless man, Robert, and who’s telling his story?
In the early days of the Internet, 253 (‘the story of seven cars and a crash,’ set on the London Underground) was conceived by Geoff Ryman as an online-only novel.
Alexander Masters’ book is a backwards biography of a homeless addict, Stuart Shorter, who lived on the streets of Cambridge. Tellingly, the backwards element was Stuart’s idea.
House Mother Normal is an experimental novel that at first seems to answer the question of what people are really thinking, though the author’s skilful use of format conceals more than it reveals.
‘In the middle of the journey of our life / I found myself in a dark wood, / for I had lost the right path.’
In Summer 2013, a graduation speech given by the idiosyncratic novelist, short-story genius and children’s author George Saunders went viral.
When I first read this children’s book, I was desperate to give it to everyone I knew- first my flatmate, then my parents. In fact, I wanted to have kids so I could share it with them about ten years later (it‘s still waiting patiently on my shelf for that moment).
When I was about twelve years old, me and the other gay kid in my class used to hide in the library. This was partly because he got beaten up a lot and partly so we could photocopy pictures of the movie idols we unfashionably adored at a time when everyone else was into Take That.
Truth and Beauty is lifted above most memoirs by Ann Patchett’s unselfishness; she is writing a book that tells her own story, but frequently steps aside to offer the full spotlight to her friend, the magical, difficult Lucy Grealy, author of ‘Autobiography of a Face.’ Lucy Grealy, who died at th
‘Dear Joe, your wild noisy huge brother/is dead. I couldn’t do what my parents did/bring two boys, four years apart, through the maze.’