Margaret Forster
I hardly ever read autobiographies — well, usually a load of cunningly crafted lies, don't you think? — but Jill Tweedie's Eating Children (Viking, £15.99) attracted me and I loved it. She made such an enter- tainment out of her life, so who cares how much of it is strictly true. I can't bear the thought that there will be no second volume.
But it's novels I go for (yes, could be that's why I liked the above — it reads like one) and plenty stand out. What? A Suit- able Boy? Oh, please. Worthy, sweet, decent, some beautiful set pieces but PLOD, PLOD, PLOD all the way. What I went for was Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses (Pan Macmillan, £5.99) the rhythms of his prose are extraordinary; The Waters of Thirst by Adam Mars Jones (Faber, £14.99), funny even at its most sad, and it is a sad love story. The Eye in the Door by Pat Barker (Viking, £14.99) con- tinues on from her previous first world war novel, Regeneration, and goes deeper; and although the first 90 pages are wince- making, the rest of Birdsong, by Sebastian Faulks, was original and gripping (Hutchinson, 14.95).
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