Atonement’s links – Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer

I’m teaching McEwan’s Atonement this year for the first time, and this has sent me off in search of all the works which have influenced McEwan’s novel. Some of the texts are familiar to me – The Go-Between, Brideshead Re-visited, anything by Woolf – but I hadn’t read Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer (1927). In fact, …

The Love Child – Edith Oliver

It's not often I read something that I feel is genuinely very different to anything I've read before, and there isn't anything about Agatha Bodenham, the unmarried daughter left to her own devices following the death of her mother, that initially strikes you as particularly unique. But Oliver's 1927 novel takes the spinster figure - …

Salt Lick – Lulu Allison

This is the tale of a pandemic and its aftermath. It is also the tale of a climate in turmoil and the social chaos that ensues. For all that, it is also a very heartening novel, a study of the good in humans when so many actions are driven by fear. Jesse is a young …