Tuesday 1 November 2011

"Appleby House" by Sylvia Smith

A chronicle of a year in rented accommodation.

Sylvia rents a bedsit with kitchen in a four bedroom house, sharing with lonely Laura, Susanna and her sister Beverley, Sharon and her boyfriend Peter, and later Tracey. The girls bicker about the domestic arrangements and the noises they make to keep the others awake. They surf the highs of sharing a bottle of wine and getting a little tiddly and the lows of being ill at Christmas and redundancy. The characters are grey and thin, the dialogue is stilted and colourless, the book is banal and humdrum.

"The East End minimalist is back," says the Observer. "If her style were to be translated into an object, it would  be an antimacassar or a crotcheted white-lace doily." Which is fair enough. If that is your idea of literature.

Boring.

November 2011; 160 pages


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