Although I know many people thought this the best book they had read all year, I found it, in a word, boring. My only motivation for continuing to slog through it was that it was my book club’s selection for the month, although in the end I had to miss that particular meeting.

As most people know by now, this is the story of two women in Afghanistan, both of whom we meet as children. Mariam, the product of an affair between a maid and the married master of the house, lives with her mother in Herat and is occasionally visited by her father. After her mother's death, Mariam is married off to Rasheed, a man 30 years her senior who lives in Kabul. Rasheed does not allow her to leave the house unless she is with him and covered by the burqa. When she fails to produce a son, Rasheed becomes even more abusive.

Laila, who lives on the same street as Mariam and Rasheed, is orphaned in her teens when her parents are killed by a bomb. Pregnant and told that her boyfriend has been killed, Laila sees no choice but to accept Rasheed's invitation to become his wife, joining Mariam in the household. After some initial enmity the two women become friends, and Rasheed's abuse extends to Laila as well. I don’t think I’ve given anything away; you can see all of these plot developments coming when the girls are first introduced.

Two things made this story so boring. One is the simplicity of the language. Some books can hold my attention with the sheer beauty of their prose, but this isn't one of them. I admire Hosseini's courage for writing in English, which is not his first language, but the simple sentences and preponderance of one-syllable words hardly constitute a prose style likely to capture the interest of an adult reader. While appropriate for the sections of the book about the women's childhoods, the use of such language to describe their lives as adults further infantilises them. Perhaps this is Hosseini's intent.

The second and more important factor is that the characters are one-dimensional. Abused Woman #1 and Abused Woman #2 passively suffer their fate. I respect that Hosseini is trying to challenge himself by writing about women, but even the male characters—Rasheed, Mariam's father, Laila's boyfriend—have no depth. None of the characters grows or changes in the course of the story. Well, Mariam does eventually befriend Laila and try to protect her, but that does not make Mariam any different from the girl she had been before her marriage. Without character development, the story becomes just one instance of abuse after another. Perhaps if the characters had been presented in more depth, I might have cared about them and cared about their fate. But I didn't.

Michael Chabon in his fascinating collection of essays, Maps and Legends, talks about the dangers involved in creating characters. To make them live, you must confront your fears, reveal deeply hidden secrets, tell the truth. Here, Hosseini views his characters from a distance, moving them around like chesspieces on a board, never truly getting inside their heads.

Of some interest are the details of daily life in Herat and Kabul. However, since the two women spend most of their time imprisoned in the house, such details are few and far between. I'm at a loss to understand why so many people liked this book so much. Maybe if I had known nothing about spousal abuse or the lives of women in fundamentalist societies, I would have found the book more interesting.

On the other hand, perhaps I am expecting too much, wanting literary substance in a popular novel. But the best book they'd read all year? Oh well. This is not the first time that high expectations have ruined a novel for me.

These are the top twelve best books I read in 2008. If I blogged about the book, then I’ve noted the date when I posted the review; please check the archive for a fuller discussion of the book.

1. Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino
8 September 08
Indescribable. You just have to experience it.

2. Averno, by Louise Gluck
Gluck’s lyric meditations on death, often using the myth of Persephone as a way in; deceptively simple language that strikes to the core, the beauty of the natural world, solace and despair commingled. Still too close to these poems to blog about them.

3. The Three-Cornered World (Kusa Makura), by Natsume Soseki
22 September 08
An artist visits a remote mountain resort out of season; beautiful descriptions, thoughtful—and sometimes funny—discussions about life and art. Is solitude necessary for immersion in your art? Is distance necessary for aesthetic appreciation of life?

4. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, by Kate Summerscale
8 December 08
Fascinating account of a true crime investigation by one of Scotland Yard's first detectives, with illuminating social context about Victorian England.

5. The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, by G.B. Edwards
31 March 08
Fictional first-person narrative of life on Guernsey in the beginning of the 20th century; a character and a voice that stay with you.

6. The Lost Upland, by W.S. Merwin
12 May 08
Three stories set in the rural uplands of France with their limestone outcroppings, sheep pastures, and vineyards; gorgeous language, flawed and funny characters, the sadness of an ancient way of life disappearing.

7. The Gathering, by Anne Enright
13 October 08
A peculiarly affecting story of an Irish family; fiction rarely feels this real.

8. The Untouchable, by John Banville
11 February 08
Fictional retelling of the story of Anthony Blunt, one of the Cambridge spies; devotion, betrayal, the quest for authenticity—it's all here.

9. True Confessions, by John Gregory Dunne
A classic crime story—can't imagine why I'd never read it before; it has the qualities that later made Chinatown such a great film.

10. After, by Marita Golden
Will change the way you think about race, cities, police. One of the most honest books I've ever read. Just as good on this second read for my book club.

11. The Lighthouse, by P.D. James
2 June 08
Further investigations by Commander Dalgleish, this time on a small island off the coast of Cornwall that has been turned into an exclusive resort; an intelligent read, with allusions to lighthouses and small islands to delight the reader.

12. The Darling, by Russell Banks
A woman's life, from Weather Underground to Liberia to a farm in upstate NY; I especially appreciated the parts set in Liberia and the understanding of its past and complex present that I gained from this book.

A good corrective to last week's Lost Highway with its almost-too-close-for-comfort point of view. Here, the point of view is about as remote as you can get and still be close third person (i.e., following a particular character). The tone is distant and impersonal, as though the events were being observed from a high mountaintop.

Each of the four sections of the book features a different set of people, all from the same family. The first part, set in Saskatchewan, covers twenty years in lives of Margaret and Davis, starting from their meeting in 1933. Davis has just emigrated from Scotland and is working his way across Canada. In Regina, he falls ill and meets Margaret, who is a nurse in the town's small clinic. Although she grew up on a farm and he in a fishing family, they share a love of books and language. Their meeting changes their lives as both let go of their dreams and settle down on a farm. We alternate between the two seamlessly as their relationship and marriage mature.

The second part follows their daughter, Hilda, as she moves from Saskatchewan to Toronto. Hilda's daughter, Danielle, is the focus of the third part, which covers her childhood in Toronto and young adulthood in Paris. Then the focus shifts to Osman, a man she meets there who is half Turkish and half English. The fourth and last part follows Sophie and Sasha, Danielle's children.

Each part is self-contained. While some of the distance comes from the tone of the book, it is also a result of these separate novelettes. We move fairly quickly through time and space: the book covers the years from 1933 to 1991 and shifts from Regina to Toronto to Paris to London, back to Paris and then to New York.

I felt that I did not have the leisure to get to know the characters the way I would have liked, but the overview approach has its advantages. I remember liking Western Civ in college. At least a dozen times in each hour-long lecture, our professor would say, “And now we see on the horizon . . . “ The course, though superficial in many ways, gave me an overall timeline, a structure in which to fit my later, more in-depth readings.

Similarly, this book, by covering four generations in a little over 250 pages gives a sense of what is gained and lost by a family's multiple emigrations that complements the more in-depth explorations of the emigrant experience by authors such as Michael Ondaatje and Jhumpa Lahiri. Although I always find it a little sad to read a compressed version of someone’s life—I feel that so much of what made that life worthwhile is missing, and death comes so soon—I enjoyed this book.

I had a difficult time getting into this book, but I stuck with it because I have liked Richards's books in the past. The opening confused me and required several readings before I could move on. Eventually I realised that the book is written in a point of view that is even closer than close third person.

A quick recap of point of view (POV) may be in order. In first person POV the main character narrates the story: “I opened the refrigerator door, but didn’t see anything I wanted to eat.” Rarely used and difficult to sustain is second person POV: “So you go to the store, and you stand there staring at the ready-to-eat display, slavering over the Fettucini Alfredo and roast beef with gravy.” In third person POV the story is told by an anonymous narrator: “Her doctor had put her on a low-fat diet to bring down her cholesterol.” Third person is the most commonly used POV, and there are several variations. In third person omniscient, the narrator knows what is going on in every character’s mind and provides commentary on the action. In third person limited, the narrator sticks with a single character but still summarizes and provides background information; the narrator can also shift between multiple characters (often done, but difficult to do well). In close third person, the narrator knows only what a particular character knows, sees only what that character sees; while describing events through the character’s consciousness; however, the story is told in the narrator’s voice.

Here, Richards takes close third person a step further. Each section of the book is written as though the featured character himself were writing it, so that we get events filtered through his mindset and described in his voice.

The story opens in rural New Brunswick with Burton Tucker, a brain-damaged man who runs a failing convenience store. We experience life as Burton sees it, so no wonder I found the beginning confusing. Bewildered and forgetful as he is, Burton believes that he has sold a winning lottery ticket worth thirteen million dollars to Jim Chapman, a local man whose construction company has gone bankrupt.

Burton mentions this to Alex Chapman, Jim’s middle-aged great-nephew. Initially planning to be a priest, Alex went off to seminary but became disillusioned. At university, he had some success but left just as he was about to receive tenure and returned home. I was dismayed at first by the tirades about corrupt priests and seminarians, phony (but politically correct) professors and students, and ignorant friends and neighbors. However, I finally realised that these are Alex's views. He thinks everyone else is as ineffectual and dishonest as he himself is. At least I hope that’s true. I’d hate to think that these are Richards’s opinions and voice.

Upon his return he lives with his great-uncle. The two Chapmans are locked in an endless battle, and eventually Jim throws Alex out. Living in a shack, mooning over his high school girlfriend who is married, Alex is sure that she still loves him and that the money from the winning lottery ticket would bring her back to him. One of his high school tormentors who has since become a friend, Leo Bourque, gets wind of Alex’s scheme and demands a share. The two clash over right and wrong, predestination and free will, life and death.

Alex reminds me of Wade Whitehouse in Russell Banks's Affliction. Living in a trailer in rural New Hampshire, working as a well-driller, snowplow operator and part-time town cop, Wade sees his life gradually disintegrate even as he tries to turn it around. He is fighting on all fronts: plowing the relentless snow, worrying about money, battling his ex-wife for more time with his daughter. His great chance comes when he believes he has uncovered a web of corruption in his town. Like Alex, he has great schemes and great dreams and can't understand why nothing works out for him.

However, Wade engaged my sympathy in a way that Alex never did. Perhaps this is the danger inherent in forcing the reader to spend so much time in the head of an unpleasant, egotistical, obtuse character whose life is spiralling out of control. Much as I admired Richards's skill in crafting this unusual point of view, I didn't settle down and enjoy myself until we got to Markus Paul, the First Nations policeman with a rational and logical mind, who is investigating a local murder. On the other hand, the relentless darkness and ruination do serve to highlight the rare good and unselfish act.

There is much to like here. The ever-changing relationship betwen Alex and Leo is very well done, full of surprising insight and unexpected turns. And Richards always excels when exploring the effects of poverty and the unforeseen things it can lead you to do.

This remarkable novel is a mystery like no other I’ve read. There is a crime, to be sure, but we know who did it and more or less why. Swan ignores the conventions of the mystery genre and instead explores the effects of the crime on the inhabitants of the small town where it occurred. While moving forward in time linearly for the most part, each chapter is told from the perspective of a different character: the father as a child hiding in a tree, the mother telling of her children’s births, the doctor who treated one of the girls, the playmate of the other, the girls themselves.

Longtime readers of this blog will know that I am not a fan of narratives with multiple points of view. Perhaps I am simply becoming a crotchety curmudgeon, preferring the sustained 19th century narratives—my first favorite reading—to the frenetic jump-cutting of some modern novels. And it’s true: I prefer to have only one window open at a time on the computer, and cannot stand the little commercials that have started popping up in the corner of the television screen over the last few years. Perhaps I’m too easily distracted, or too linear a thinker.

I prefer to believe, though, that it’s just a very difficult task, writing multiple points of view, and most writers who try just aren’t up to the challenge. Some, though not all, are successful when alternating chapters between the perspectives of two or three characters. Even then, the stronger narratives employ these changes in succession rather than going back and forth with each chapter. Worst of all is when we jump from one character’s head to another within a single scene.

Here, each chapter stays with a single character. Although I found it a little confusing at first, the quality of writing was such that it was worth making the effort to reorient myself at the beginning of each chapter. Swan uses little imagery, relying instead on the things of this world to take us into the lives of these people living, first in England at the end of the 19th century, and then in a small town in Canada. We inhabit each character, whether it is a little boy sneaking out of the house before dawn and walking through the sleeping town, a woman watching the image appear the first time she develops a photograph, or a man gradually growing more inebriated as he sits over a long dinner with other men of the town trying to make sense of the events that have engulfed them.

Turning the last page, I was startled to realise how invested I had become in these people and their town. Even such short accounts bring out the depth of emotion, the reality of these lives. Together they make up a mosaic reflecting our fractured reality, our distinct perceptions and personal filters. Just as individuals must function within the web of society, so these stories together reveal the cumulative effects of this crime and its aftermath and left me thinking about the lasting effects of a single incident. There are many turning points here, often small events in themselves—decisions made, undeserved hardships endured—that gradually shape these lives. I don’t believe in fate, but I do believe that we are changed and molded, even our very brain chemistry altered, by the happenings large and small that make up our histories.

What a fascinating book! Summerscale relates the events leading up to and following a true crime, the murder of a child in Road Hill House in June of 1860. The Road Hill murder captured the public's imagination, as did Jon-Benet Ramsey's murder more recently. During the decade previous to the Road Hill murder, the number of newspapers had multiplied at an astonishing rate, going from 700 in 1855 to 1,100 in 1860. Domestic killings had become popular fodder—even then, apparently, “if it bleeds, it leads”—and the Road Hill murder, with its twists and turns, took over the headlines.

One of the best things about this book is the way it puts the details of the case into the cultural context of Victorian English society. For example, it was only in the 19th century that the home of the nuclear family became a “sacred space”, a secure refuge that should not be violated by public scrutiny or by government aggression. Every home a castle, in other words. One newspaper of the time even compared this tradition to a castle’s moat. I wonder if this cultural change could be related to the concurrent proliferation of newspapers with their daily fare of sex and violence.

Among others, Charles Dickens was fascinated by the case. He believed, as did the local police and a majority of the public, that Samuel Kent, the father, and Elizabeth Gough, the nursemaid, were responsible. The popular scenario held that three-year-old Saville must have woken in the night to see the two engaged in, er, inappropriate behavior, and was killed to keep him from telling anyone.

Summerscale enables us to follow the case along with the police and public. She gives us the clues, the interviews, the photographs of the major players, extracts of newspaper articles. She includes drawings of the layout of the house and yard, just as the papers of the day did, exposing that private space and the family’s private actions to public view. We learn about the history of the Kents, that the second Mrs. Kent, Saville’s mother, had been governess to her four stepchildren during Mr. Kent’s first marriage, to a woman said to be insane. Jane Eyre had been published 13 years earlier, in 1847.

The man named to investigate the murder was Jack Whicher, one of the eight men selected for the first detective unit to be set up in England. These men, making up their methods as they went along, thrilled the public with their exploits and became the models for Wilkie Collins's Sgt. Cuff in The Moonstone and Dickens’s Inspector Bucket in Bleak House. Whicher himself was well-known as a quiet, shrewd, and successful detective. He later played a significant role in the case of the Tichborne Claimant.

Assigned to the case over two weeks after the murder, Whicher found himself at odds with the local police. Not only did they refuse to cooperate with the London detective, but during the intervening weeks, they had lost important clues and allowed themselves to be hoodwinked by the Kent family. For example, on the night after the murder’s discovery, the policemen assigned to stay in Road Hill House and prevent the family from tampering with clues spent the night locked in the kitchen by Mr. Kent, a fact they later tried to cover up.

Whicher’s investigation was also hampered by public pressure when he arrested someone other than the nursemaid, Gough, for the crime. Knowing who has committed a crime and proving it are two different things, of course, and this crime, like so many in our day, was tried not only in the courtroom but in the press and the pubs and the breakfast rooms. Summerscale’s book gives us a resolution of sorts, but doubts remain as to what really happened on that June night.

The Road Hill murder inspired many early English detective stories: The Moonstone and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, as well as The Turn of the Screw and Charlotte Yonge's The Trial. Only a few years earlier, in 1849, the first English detective story had appeared, so the genre was still in its infancy. I highly recommend this true story of the origins of the English detective story.

Every year I collect the songs I’ve been listening to over and over in a playlist. Here is this year’s:

Working Class Hero, John Lennon
Working Poor, David Francey
Workhouse Boy, Sweet Felons All
Pretty Polly, Orange Line Special
Long Black Veil, The Band
Hard Steel Mill, David Francey
A Thousand Miles, David Francey
Long Way Home, David Francey
Hills/Mulqueen's, Nightingale
Regain/Psalm of Life/Plant un Chou, Nightingale
The Waiting Game/Raze, Nightingale
La Belle Rose, Nightingale
Three Pieces By O'Carolan, John Renbourn
The Lady and the Unicorn, John Renbourn
William Taylor, John Roberts & Tony Barrand
Brigg Fair, John Roberts & Tony Barrand
The Maid of the Mill, Jinky Wells
The Pleasant Month Of May, Sam Larner
John Barleycorn, Tim Radford
The Painful Plough, Finest Kind
The Orphan/Through the Grapevine, Elvie Miller & Naomi Morse
Honeysuckle Cottage, Band Of Friends
Whiskey Before Dinner, Band Of Friends
Farewell to Whiskey, Rhythm Rollers
Precious Staggering Blues, Precious Bryant
A Song For Sheryl/David's Air/Rorate Coeli/I Long For Thy Virginitie, Waverley Station
Waiting For Jim, Waverley Station
Calum Sgaire, Alasdair Fraser
A New Beginning, Bare Necessities
The Star Of The County Down, Walt Michael & Company
John Of Dreams, Walt Michael & Company
Fanny Power, Walt Michael & Company
Ashokan Farewell, Walt Michael & Company
Botany Bay, Kate Rusby
Urge for Going, Tom Rush
Moon On The Water, Aengus Finnan
The Black Isle, Becky Tracy

The standard take on creative nonfiction, as promulgated by Lee Gutkind, et al., is that it is a factual narrative (that's the nonfiction part) told using creative writing techniques, a narrative that provides information about a subject while telling a story. This book provides lots of information about Florida's history, Florida's quirky inhabitants, the history of orchid collecting, and some of orchid experts. Where it falls down is that there is no story at the core of the book.

It starts out as a sketch of John Larouche, an odd character who goes from one obsession to another, a narcissist who in his orchid period persuaded two Seminole Native Americans to help him steal wild orchids from Fakahatchee Swamp. They were caught and, despite Larouche's argument that the Seminoles (and their employee) were exempt from laws protecting endangered species and public land, prosecuted.

The only other discernable narrative is the author's desire to see a particular species, a ghost orchid. She wades through swamps and talks to collectors and merchants alike, but always seems to arrive just before or just after her elusive prey has bloomed.

Neither story line is enough to sustain the book. There are too many tangents, chapters full of well-researched information that do not move either story forward. I admit that none of these subjects particularly interests me, but good writers are always able to jump start my curiosity. I just read—fascinated—a ten-page article about the recent history of Cyprus in the London Review of Books simply because Perry Anderson's prose sucked me in and wouldn't let me go.

That didn't happen here.

The book's flap promised that it would help me understand the passion that motivates people to collect things: orchids, whatever. I'd hoped this was true. I don't get collecting. I just don't get it. Sure, I'm as materialistic as the next person and there are sometimes things that I just have to have, whether it's a particular blue and green scarf or a book about Arts and Crafts gardens. But I don't have to have every kind of scarf in the world or every garden book. Not that there's anything wrong with that; it's just not something that I can imagine wanting.

My mother left me an assortment of her tchotchkes. I confess I don't know what to do with them. I can't just give them to the Salvation Army because they are “family” pieces: a teacup made from clay from the family farm, crystal salt dishes handed down from my great-grandmother. I don't want to dust them for the rest of my life, and certainly my kids aren't interested in them. But I can't bring myself to toss them. Someone, generations from now perhaps, may want to touch and hold something of their history. At the same time, they're just stuff. And stuff has always weighed me down. I like emptiness, empty space around me. I'd hoped this book would take me briefly into the mind and heart of someone who wants one of every kind of something, a collector, someone obsessive about things.

That didn't happen either.

The book seems to me like a character study, an essay (the author alludes to an earlier article she wrote on the subject) that someone thought could be expanded into a book. It's well-written. Orlean does a good job of presenting information in a palatable form, and her transitions between sections are very well done. But without a story, the book is hollow at the center. I found it boring.

On Friday night, tired and a little discouraged by the results of the week's work, I went to see this production by the Reisterstown Theatre Project. Inspecting Carol is a comedy about a small, cash-strapped theater company rehearsing for their annual production of A Christmas Carol. With only four days for rehearsal, some of the characters repeatedly admonish everyone to get down to business, while others run rogue by trying to rewrite the story or create distractions by arguing about costumes or leading vocal exercises.

I don't know when I last laughed so hard. Within the first couple of minutes, a sardonic look from the actor playing M.J. McMann, the stage manager, had me chuckling. As the ridiculosity escalated, any residual self-consciousness vanished and my guffaws turned to helpless shouts of laughter, leaving me bent weakly over my knees wiping away tears.

I'm generally not a big fan of comedy, as it seems to be practiced today. Disparaging, hurtful jokes make me sad, and most physical comedy just seems painful. Stories where you can see from a mile away that a character is setting himself/herself up for an embarrassing if not distressing situation bore me.

However, this production found my sweet spot. The actors' facial expressions were priceless. Pratfalls and other physical comedy bits were used sparingly and always as part of the story. There was a bit with one of the ghosts—I don't want to give anything away—that had me laughing so hard I could barely hear the lines. There was plenty of wordplay and just the right amount of repetition, enough for the line to become like a family's in-joke without edging over into a boring anecdote you've heard too many times. And best of all, there were long cons, humor set up throughout the play that culminated in a surprising payoff at the end.

Afterwards, I talked with Paul, who plays Kevin Trent Emery, the long-suffering business manager. Paul mentioned that when he first read the play, he didn't think it was funny. It was supposed to be a comedy, but nothing in the script seemed humorous. It wasn't until he heard the other actors speak their lines that he began to realise how hilarious the production could be. His comment made sense to me; the humor was less in the words themselves than in what the actors and director did with them.

As a writer, I'm very conscious of the fact that all I can do is throw the words out there and hope that gentle readers will interpret them, if not necessarily in the way I intended, at least in a way that is meaningful to them. I know only too well from my own reading that coming off a spectacular book can doom an okay one, just as a tired or cranky mood can keep even a great novel from catching my interest. Playwrights, on the other hand, have the advantage of an intermediary: actors who interpret their words for the audience. As a writer of prose, I have to find ways to bring those cues—sardonic looks, pratfalls, etc.—into the text. Similarly, without set and costume designers to create the visual space, I have to incorporate those descriptions without slowing the story down too much. I once heard Timothy Findley—one of my favorite authors—talk about how his early acting career had taught him about dramatic structure and pacing. I need to think more about what the theater has to teach prose writers.

I'm a big fan of Kate Atkinson's writing (I've blogged about Behind the Scenes at the Museum and Case Histories), so my expectations were high when I picked up this new novel.

Since the action described in Case Histories, Jackson Brodie has used his inheritance to retire from his job as a private detective and purchase an estate in France. As this novel starts, he and his sometime girlfriend, Julia, are in Edinburgh where she has a part in one of the festival offerings. As Jackson leaves Julia's venue, he witnesses a fender-bender that escalates into road rage. Murder is narrowly avoided by the reluctant action of a bystander who, shocked out of his native timidity, throws his briefcase at the giant wielding a baseball bat.

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed that I am not a fan of novels where the point of view jumps around. Here, chapters alternate between Jackson, Martin (the bystander), Paul (the victim in the accident), Gloria (another bystander, wife of builder who puts up acres of shoddy homes), Louise (a recently promoted Detective Inspector), Archie (Louise's teenaged son), Richard (a friend of a friend of Martin), and Sophia (a maid who cleans Martin's home). There's a crazy Russian woman too, but I don't think there's a chapter from her point of view. I could be wrong.

At least we stay with one point of view for the entire chapter (and it's always a close third person, not first person), but the end result is almost as confusing as that list suggests. What saves it is that the core of the story sticks with Jackson, Louise, Gloria, and Martin. And, of course, Atkinson's writing skill. Still, I found this novel hard going, especially the first few chapters when we get biographies of each of the main characters. I never did get them all sorted out, but had to keep going back to remind myself of which family background went with which character.

Just to be clear, a poor Atkinson novel is still pretty darn good. I liked the way Atkinson explores Brodie's feelings, as an ex-policeman, when he finds himself on the wrong side of the interview table. On the other hand, the truly horrible excerpts from Martin's cozy crime novels bothered me. Impossible to believe novels so poorly written could be as successful as the story claimed, and this broad satire made it hard to take the story's crimes as seriously as we are clearly meant to. The occasionally satirical tone also jarred against the description of Louise's agonising struggles as the single mother of a 14-year-old boy.

It's easy to find fault. I admire Atkinson for trying a different form and for writing what, despite its defects, is still a good read.