The Dinner

Whenever I’m reading publicity material for books my hackles are raised by phrases such as “If you loved xx then you’ll love this”. It’s such a cheap way of selling a book which ignores the merits of the book being sold and attempts to piggy-back on the popularity of a previous success. I can see the merits of such tactics…

The Slap

One of last year’s big publishing hits was Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap. It won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and author John Boyne called it “one of the three or four truly great novels of the new millennium”