Matthew Kneale's Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance is a collection of 12 short stories about ordinary people like you and me drifting in a morally-ambiguous world while being tormented by senses of paranoid, despondency and defeat. The pace of these stories is crisp but never haste, the narrative straightforward but never simple. If you like Kneale's English Passenger, you probably would enjoy Small Crimes.
Ian McEwain's Saturday is a totally different beast. It gives a very initamte look at the post-911 world through the eys of a middle-class Londoner who wakes up one Saturday to a sudden revelation of how close violence actually lurks, and how the repercussions of global events have come to tear his contented life apart. His observations are at times acute and funny, at times sarcastic and insenstive, while always poignant. This is my first Ian McEwan book, and the aftertaste is rather delightful. He'll be on my watchlist.
Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves is next. To say this book is funny as hell is an understatement. Sticklers of the World, Unite!
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