On a wet Tuesday in a Manchester taproom, forty people sit reading in near silence, and the only thing anyone orders aloud is another round.
The sentence as a place to live
Publishers will tell you that autumn is the serious season, when the heavy hardbacks arrive and the reviewers sharpen their adjectives. Readers have never paid much attention. They carry what they love onto trains and into waiting rooms, and they recommend it to anyone who stands still long enough.
It is the only social event where nobody asks what you do for a living.
What the prize lists miss
What makes this book worth the time is not its plot, which could be summarised on a bus ticket, but its patience. Chapters end a little earlier than you expect. People leave rooms without explaining themselves. You find yourself reading more slowly as you go, which is the highest compliment a novel can receive.
A shelf worth rearranging
Independent booksellers report that handwritten shelf notes now outperform almost every form of paid promotion. It is a small and cheering fact: in a year of algorithmic everything, the most persuasive recommendation is still a stranger with a biro and an opinion.
There are flaws, and they are honest ones. The middle section sags under one subplot too many, and the ending arrives with a neatness the rest of the book has spent three hundred pages resisting. Forgive it. Very few writers working today are this interested in how people actually behave.
