P. J. Kavanagh
Shusaku Endo is the leading Japanese writ- er of his generation (b. 1923) and his The Girl I Left Behind (Peter Owen, £14.99) is a remarkably convincing study, without irony or evasion, of a kind of goodness that seems vaguely familiar. Then you realise with a shock that it is specifically Christian goodness. It comes as an even greater shock to realise that no such novel is to be expected in English and that the odd refreshment it provides had to be translat- ed from the Japanese.
As for poetry, earlier this year there was a promotion of 20 'New Generation' poets (under 40) and the quick cleverness of some of them was awesome. For the pur- poses of this recommendation I went to the pile and let my fingers do the voting; I found they chose the one I remembered with most warmth, and most (at that moment) wanted to look at again: The Queen of Sheba by Kathleen Jamie (Blood- axe, £6.95). Jamie has a raw-boned generosity and gives it a sound of her own. The title-poem alone, a bold rebuttal of Scottish provincial sourness, is enough to warm the cockles.
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