Saturday, July 19, 2014

Ten top books of the Midlands

Sathnam Sanghera is a British journalist and author of Marriage Material: A Novel and The Boy With The Topknot: A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton. He claims "there is certain way of thinking and writing when you are neither from the north or the south, when you live in an English urban, multicultural setting which is not London," and tagged ten top books that capture that mindset, including:
The News Where You Are by Catherine O' Flynn

The author of the Costa prize-winning What Was Lost is a master of dialogue and social comedy and all her books make me ache with envy, but the idea of setting a novel around a regional TV news programme was particularly inspired. O'Flynn gets a great deal of comedy out of presenter Frank Allcroft, who is described in the book as "the unfunniest man on God's Earth", but her teasing never veers into mockery. A book as humane as it is amusing.
Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue