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Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor is an original and very moving tour de force, in which the author manages to simultaneously speed time up and slow it down, while also gently outing our readerly hunger for drama, violence and (too) simple closure.
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The Locals by Jonathan Dee (Corsair) is a compassionate look at the American middle class and what is happening to it and the ways, right and wrong, in which it is responding. Barry writes warmth so that warmth is a form of truth. With Barry, it’s as if every book he writes is a bit like this - and then there’s this novel. Occasionally you know that one of the writers alive at the same time as you has written the book they were born to write. Then there’s Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (Bloomsbury Circus). I think it’s one of the finest books I’ve yet read. It does this personally, universally, locally and internationally with an eye to what unites and protects us from the power-madness of a divide-and-rule mentality that’s once more, right now, courting catastrophe. I started it with Philippe Sands’s East West Street (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), which examines the meaning and importance of law, of the words that go to make it and of life lived well versus life lived foully.