Across the literary pages | 28 March 2011

The Telegraph profiles Jennifer Egan, whose A Visit From the Goon Squad is well tipped to win the Orange Prize.

‘A Visit from the Goon Squad is a work of imaginative energy and charm, and it deserves to win Egan many converts this side of the Atlantic. So much the better if those converts went on to explore some of the back catalogue, which takes in five books of great talent and surprising range.

Given the vigorous experimentation in the later work, the apparent traditionalism of Egan’s first two books is striking. She followed a hit-and-miss collection of short stories, Emerald City (1993), with the novel The Invisible Circus (1995), a coming-of-age story set at the tail-end of the Seventies that follows a young American girl who heads to Europe to investigate her sister’s death. But the Germany and Italy she dreams of are still in the grip of the Baader-Meinhof attacks and the Italian anni di piombo, and a quest that begins simply will end with some disturbing revelations.