A NDREW T AYLOR If I had been a Booker judge, David
Mitchell’s Black Swan Green (Sceptre, £16.99) would have been high on my shortlist: a stammering boy grows up in a Worcestershire village against the background of the Falklands war. Mitchell, a complex and wonderfully inventive novelist, shows he can handle simplicity just as well.
Frances Fyfield’s The Art of Drowning (Little, Brown, £18.99) is a superbly written and highly readable crime novel about a woman who tries to do what is right, and is willing to pay the price for it. Simultaneously, though, it operates on a level that transcends genre fiction.
In Laura Wilson’s A Thousand Lies, her sixth novel (Orion, £9.99), a journalist stumbles on the terrible truth about a case in which murder came as a happy ending. Wilson is brilliant at uncovering the secrets of unhappy families. She’s a writer who started well and gets better with every book.
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