Shattered, The Hare with Amber Eyes, One Day
What an eclectic group of books to comment on, you may well say — and it is true that Shattered (Rebecca Asher), an indictment of how women have colluded in their own undoing, largely by obeying their biological drive to have something to cuddle, does not sit easily alongside One Day (David Nicholls), a thinly-veiled first draft of a Richard Curtis movie, and The Hare with Amber Eyes (Edmund de Waal), the story of 264 small carvings, travelling around anti-Semitic Europe from the 1870s to the present day. The only thing that brings them together is that I have been compelled by all three of them in very different ways, and read them with equal absorption for very different reasons. One Day is captivating because it tells the story of my generation: people who went to university in the dog days of the 1980s, after an upbringing under Thatcher, graduating into a recession. It is a great chronicle, in the tradition that only the English seem to do well, of wistful regret for fulfi...