Reading the Review section of the newspaper today I was looking at what was being written about new books which have been recently published, and noticed the little subtitles heading each review:

novels full of elegant insights
sensational novel won’t disappoint
urgent, necessary and wonderfully disturbing
the most unsettling novel of the author’s career
daring use of an almost silent narrator
consoling fantasies… both popular and critically acclaimed
an heir to Virginia Woolf… subtly but surely reinvents the novel

I wonder what might be said about my novels if I were so lucky to have them published and reviewed? I definitely don’t write novels full of elegant insights, nor could any of the be described as sensational, nor urgent, nor unsettling, let alone wonderfully disturbing. I’ll have to read the book to find out how a narrative could be conducted by a silent narrator, and whether i think it is daring or not… I don’t write consoling fantasies, and definitely don’t reinvent novels…

I will have to think what I am trying to do, and what impact I would hope to make by my stories…

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