Penelope Lively
Darryl Pinckney's High Cotton (Faber, £5.99) is an exuberant, maverick account of growing up in the South: 'No one sat me down and told me I was a Negro,' it begins. Shrewd, penetrating, written with tremen- dous wit and verve. I have also much enjoyed Matthew Kneale's Sweet Thames (Black Swan, £5.99) — a fascinating novel which succeeds in being a fast-moving suspense story as well as an absorbing account of the problems of sewage disposal in 19th-century London. I'm someone who is usually deeply resistant to historical fiction, but this won me over within the first few pages. I had hoped to see Carol Shields win the Booker with The Stone Diaries (Fourth Estate, £12.99). It is a love- ly book, the story of one woman's life told with such ingenuity and elegance that the cumulative effect is startling — you feel that you have read several novels miracu- lously compressed into one.
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