Tag Archives | contemporary fiction

“Saturday” by Ian McEwan

27 April 2011 · Reading · Comments { 1 }

Not my favourite McEwan – that is Atonement by a long way. This was OK, a more meditative book, full of long meandering passages from the head of Henry Perowne, a successful neurosurgeon living in Marylebone with his successful wife and talented blues-musician son, awaiting the return from France of his beautiful and talented and [...]

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“Best European Fiction 2010″ edited by Aleksandar Hemon

15 December 2010 · Reading · Comments { 1 }

This was a very interesting collection of short stories from around Europe. There’s one piece from each country, so it really felt like a broad and varied collection rather than being weighted toward particular countries. One thing I didn’t like is that some of them were extracts from longer pieces, which I don’t think works [...]

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British “state of the nation” novels

5 February 2010 · Literary events · Comments { 0 }

One of my fellow Legend Press authors, Mark Piggott, wrote an interesting article in the Independent about ‘state of the nation’ novels. I thought it would be complaining that nobody’s writing about contemporary British issues these days – there’s been quite a bit of that recently, because historical novels have been getting a lot of [...]

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