Life Drawing by Robin Black; Euphoria by Lily King – love triangles that didn’t make the cut

It’s awards season again, but what of the literary gems that get left behind?

When the Man Booker prize shortlist was announced earlier this month, all I could think about was this time last year, when I was judging the Folio prize. Specifically, all I could think about was the novels I’d had to let go. I don’t mean those that I tried, and failed, to get on our shortlist; I mean those that I knew would never make it even to the long list, but to which I felt strongly attached nevertheless. It was such an unexpectedly melancholy business.

Let me press a couple of these on you. The first is Life Drawing by the American writer Robin Black which I read in a single spellbound sitting. Augusta and Owen are a long-term couple who’ve moved to the country. Ostensibly, their new isolation will enable Gus to paint and Owen to write. In reality, however, they’re escaping an affair Owen had with one of Gus’s students. At first, all is calm, though too much remains unsaid. But then into the empty house next door moves Alison, whose subtly invasive presence will soon throw up the past again. Though it goes a little awry towards the end, I can’t think that I’ve read a more intense account of the unspoken intimacy that is as necessary to a long-established couple as the very air they breathe.

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