Are you keeping up?
Well it's only Day Four of the dovegreyreader stocking filler extravaganza but we're having great fun here sharing the bounty of a year of great and often very exciting reading.
Rocky's not back from the Canada drop yet, so we're assuming the salmon was good.
But which book that I have really really enjoyed this year sits comfortably as a prize draw alongside a post about Janet Frame?
Well thanks to publisher bounty we have plenty to choose from but for tonight I've picked The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry published by Faber and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Faber have kindly offered four copies of this which can be posted
worldwide so four very lucky winners will be drawn tomorrow evening.
In many ways Roseanne McNulty's life lived in Roscommon mental hospital could so easily have been Janet's but for fortuitous events and Janet's guardian angels watching over her.
Roseanne's desolation palpable and, but for Dr Grene, her guardian angels scarce,
'I am only a thing left over, a remnant woman, and I do not even look like a human being no more, but a scraggy stretch of skin and bone in bleak skirt and blouse, and a canvas jacket, and I sit here in my niche like a songless robin - no, like a mouse that died under the hearthstone where it was warm, and lies now like a mummy in the pyramids.'
A desolation reflected so often in Janet's writing too yet none of it depressing to read and nor is The Secret Scripture.
Now I did whinge a bit about the ending I know, but have since read much more which tempers initial disbelief, and I love Sebastian Barry's writing so very much that really in the end, nothing can detract from the sublime effect of the words on the page, something I also find with Janet Frame.
So names in comments and I think I just have to extract one tiny promise from the winners...that you will seek out and read A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry (if you haven't already) to date my Best Book That Never Won the Booker.
William who won the last copy on here did and just look what happened.
'A Long Long Way absolutely floored me. I'm not a man given to tears and maybe I was just a bit tired but as I read the final few pages of this book I wept like a great big girly.'
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