Jeff Noon
June 2016
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Jeff Noon's holiday picks
I've recently discovered, and completely fallen in love with, the work of Alice Munro. In her short stories, usually set in the farmlands and small towns of rural Canada, Munro sets a loving eye on ordinary people as they approach moments of realisation: young girls come to see that their fathers are not perfect; teenagers find that escape is not that easy; widows lie in the dark, awaiting death. These are lives curtailed, filled with loneliness, misplaced chances, regret. Working against these feelings is the way Munro tells a story. She brings an incredible texture to her work: a grain of words, astonishingly beautiful sentences, paragraphs that build up one by one until the story appears from nowhere - and then disappears, almost without comment. For reader and character alike, something has taken place that is just beyond our grasp.