*The Outcast

The Outcast by Sadie Jones won the Costa Award for a first novel and was short-listed for the 2008 Orange Prize, deservedly so. The first 2/3 of the novel is brilliant.

This is a coming of age story, not my favourite genre, but I couldn't put it down and finished it in 2 days. Somehow I managed to help my children with their homework while completely absorbed in 1950′s Britain, where post-war repression, denial, and dissociation are a practised art in the village where Lewis Aldridge grows...