Learning to Swim - Clare Chambers

61%

28.01.26

I could say exactly what I said about Back Trouble but this was slightly more memorable, with more vivid characters. I didn't like the anti-only-child rhetoric though!

What You Did - Claire McGowan

45%

21.09.25

I read this because the author went to the same college as me, and a sort-of unnamed version of it did feature - but it was nothing like my experience. She seems to have hated it as much as she hated her protagonist, who has so few redeeming features that I hoped she sank under the increasingly heavy pile of increasingly ridiculous Bad Things that happened to her. It was hardly the gritty realism I suspect it was intended to be.

(I didn't realise this was by the same author - it was both similar and quite different.)

Tipping the Velvet - Sarah Waters

67%

06.03.25

Sarah Waters hasn't published a novel for more than 10 years so I was pleased to remember there was one I hadn't read. In her anniversary afterword, she's pretty critical of this, her debut novel,  but I think she's too harsh on herself. From the start, the reader is clearly in the hands of a confident and sophisticated storyteller, a late-20th-century Dickens. Yes, it was a bit messy, and the main character is self-serving to the end - and it wasn't quite as good as The Little Stranger, for example - but it's certainly a good read.

In a Good Light - Clare Chambers

 

64%

06.01.23

I much preferred this to Chambers' later and more famous Small Pleasures. Not much happened, but what did happen happened engagingly and showed how a character-driven plot can still make a good story.