02 June 2004

Kate Atkinson

I'm indebted to Tanya Fry, seventeen year old painter and poet, for this among many other educations: that she made me put aside my prejudices over highly coloured covers to read Kate Atkinson's amazing books. Playing skilfully and hilariously with the artefacts of postmodernism, Atkinson skates through humour and despair across a web of notions about family, self, identity, temporality and reality. It's all done with mirrors, it's side splittingly funny, and it will leave you in mid-air with the sudden realisation that you have ventured further into the unknown than you had intended to go.

Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Human Croquet and Emotionally Weird are novels, each with a human loss at the heart of it. Not the End of the World is an interlinked web of short stories.

  • Behind the Scenes at the Museum. London, 1995, Black Swan. 0552996181
  • Human Croquet. London, 1997, Black Swan. 055299619X
  • Emotionally Weird. London, 2000, Black Swan. 055299734X
  • Not the End of the World. London, 2002, Black Swan. 0552771058

No comments: