A century ago, Paradise might have appeared in the stout bindings of the Religious Tract Society and been distributed to the deserving young in the form of Sunday school prizes. Or perhaps not, given that it begins in the dining-room of an alien hotel where its heroine, all memory of her previous life temporarily erased, lugubriously breakfasts, having just committed a sexual act with an unappetising fellow-guest known only as ‘Mr Wispy’. However close its moral proximity to one of those Victorian temperance hymns with titles like ‘Don’t sell no more drink to my father’, A.L. Kennedy’s third novel is, in its relish of bedrock-level physical detail, quite thoroughly up to date.
By the time we first meet her, at 8.42 a.m. here in this low-ceilinged amnesiac’s hell-hole, late-thirtysomething Hannah Luckraft (her name one of several pieces of obtrusive symbolism) has been haplessly in thrall to the bottle for the best part of two decades.
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