I was reluctant to add to the praise of this author – or like her book. I mean Sally Rooney has already had most of the plaudits that can be thrown at a young debut writer: shortlisted for a string of book awards, and winner of others including the Costa Novel of the Year, and long listed for the Man Booker Prize as well as the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Sally Rooney
She’s published by Faber & Faber who can afford to throw money at her marketing and promotion. She’s young and she comes from County Mayo so she ticks boxes (age and un-London).
And in the book she’s writing something that would seem to me to be a coming of age story featuring two unlikely teenagers.
She uses the present tense. And she doesn’t use quotation marks.
Really? How can I, riven as I am with (ahem) preconceived ideas and resentment, like this author and this book?
Childishly, I thought: Oh, come on.
What happens when you read a book that’s so good, you can’t find the words to adequately describe how much you enjoyed it?
Do you believe in Christmas Miracles?
What happens when the good man you married isn’t all he seems to be?
Everyone needs the right mix of Hope and Christmas Spirit and the mysterious Natalie Hope has both in abundance.
Hopefully CM Taylor won’t take this the wrong way, but I thought the author of Staying On must be a woman.
Every so often you get to the end of a book and think: ‘I’d better read that again.’
Losing one patient to suicide is happenstance.
The phrase ‘O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive…’ might have been coined especially for Elizabeth Dulcie’s new thriller Corruption!
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