Mark Amory
Being a slow reader, I first try the shortest, or anyway shorter, works of famous novelists unknown to me. This year, with many misgivings, I read The Confusions of Young Törless by Robert Musil (Penguin, £8.99) and was shocked and impressed by the intensity of the sex and violence he describes at a military boarding school in Austria. But do I really want to continue to the great works? Nagasaki, by the prize-winning French journalist Eric Faye (Gallic Books, £7.99), describes in 112 pages a middle-aged Japanese man who suspects that someone is secretly living in his house. It is as gripping as a thriller, but sad and serious. I shall try another short one.
More confidently, I took Nora Webster (Viking, £18.99) on holiday and marvelled that Colm Tóibín could make the ordinary life of a middle-aged Irish widow so utterly compelling. So now I am reading his earlier, almost related, Brooklyn and cannot wait to find out if the nice young Italian whom Eilis met at the Irish dance in New York is to be trusted.
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