Francis King
In his Skin Lane (Serpent's Tail, £10.99) Neil Bartlett shows eerie skill in his evocation of a small, secret pocket of the City of London devoted to the skin trade way back in 1967. His account of the increasingly desperate obsession of an inarticulate senior employee in a furrier's business with one of his male assistants is masterly in its sinister progression. Another novel that greatly impressed me was Robert Edric's The Kingdom of Ashes (Doubleday, £16.99), set immediately after the war in a Germany of camps for displaced persons, a festering black market and clandestine fraternisation between victors and vanquished. With the mot juste always taking precedence over the metaphore outree, Edric's fastidious and austere style is a joy. The most overrated book to come my way was Ian McEwen's On Chesil Beach (Cape £12.99): technically proficient, as always, but tinny and wan.
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