Having thoroughly enjoyed several of Margaret Atwood’s novels, from ‘The Handmaid’s Tale‘ through ‘Surfacing’ to ‘Alias Grace’, I was intrigued to see ‘Murder in the Dark’ described as a collection of ‘short fictions and prose poems’. I make several long bus journeys a week, and if you’re sandwiched between giggling schoolgirls and someone booming down their mobile phone while the guy at the back is singing along to Alice Cooper on his ipod, it’s not an atmosphere conducive to getting absorbed in a five-hundred page novel. But these little gems take just a couple of minutes each to read and each demands to be savoured before you go on to the next one.
Tag Archive > The Man Booker Prize
Murder in the Dark
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The Cook, the Judge, his grandaughter and her lover
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The Man Booker Prize is surely one of the most influential of literary awards but also one of the most controversial. On a good year, the panel of judges will line up six cracking good reads and generate lively debate about the merits and standards of contemporary writing. In a bad year they’ll give the prize to some utterly incomprehensible twaddle like John Banville’s stinker ‘The Sea’ and leave baffled readers switched off for another year. So which camp does Kiran Desai’s ‘The Inheritance of Loss’, the winner of the 2007 prize fall into? It is a readable classic or just another dust gatherer? For me it’s a definite thumbs up but given with the reservation that it certainly won’t be to everyone’s taste.
