Hopefully CM Taylor won’t take this the wrong way, but I thought the author of Staying On must be a woman.

Partly, this was because the family-orientated thrust of the story seemed a feminine rather than a masculine theme and partly too, because in the opening pages, the authorial voice seemed to be female rather than male – don’t ask me to analyse why, that’s just the way I read it.

But the clincher was that the exploration of the inner lives of the main protagonists was…well, it’s what women writers do. Continue reading →