Photograph: Gordon Terris
has just ended? Is she not in London but Alaska, or a trappist monastery in Tibet? Who knows. With AL Kennedy, anything is possible. On Writing is published by Cape, £17.99. AL Kennedy appears at Aye Write! on April 19. For more details, go to www.ayewrite.com or for tickets call 0141 353 8000. last question … I want him to hold me and yet when he does I push him away. He comes to me with his heart on a platter and I turn my back. He thinks that showing love this way is enough and I know it isn’t, although neither of us knows how to put it right … We are both of us lonely.”
Speaking to Fairbairns on the phone before writing this review, I was convinced by her insistence that she has written it not so much for herself as for others who have suffered emotional trauma. It’s a remarkable book. Buy it. You might save someone from drowning. Or even yourself. The Silver Dark Sea by Susan Fletcher (Fourth Estate, £8.99) Fletcher continues her love affair with Scotland, following her historical novel set in Glencoe (Witch Light), with this beautifully written contemporary tale of myth and magic, set on a Scottish island. Yet for all the romance of strangers washed ashore, there is a harder message here about violence done to women and harm to families. Evelyn Waugh: Brief Lives by Michael Barber (Hesperus, £8.99) Continuing their excellent short biography series, Hesperus turn to conundrum Evelyn Waugh. He was the creator of a muchrevered upper-class English world in Brideshead Revisited, but he was also, according to friends, “a s***” and “a monster”. Outsider status when young possibly made him long to hobnob with the “right set”, no matter what. The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman (Sceptre, £8.99) Beauman whizzes through words, embracing adverbs and commas but forgetting full stops, as he rattles through the past with his 1930s hapless hero Egon Loeser (I’m guessing to be pronounced as “loser”) and his Teleportation Accident which sets a series of unlikely events (like meeting “Adele Hitler”) in motion. Clever but slightly exhausting. Moranthology by Caitlin Moran (Ebury press, £8.99) The enormous success of How To Be A Woman, Moran’s first work of non-fiction, has led to this equally autobiographical take on contemporary life, beginning with her own struggle to break into journalism as a teenager. Moran’s voice is exactly that of her columns, and it’s funny, sensible, selfdeprecating and works because it smacks of honesty.
Lesley McDowell