Warming My Hands and Telling Lies

Dinah Birch

  • So I Am Glad by A.L. Kennedy
    Cape, 280 pp, £9.99, May 1995, ISBN 0 224 03974 1
  • Now That You’re Back by A.L. Kennedy
    Vintage, 248 pp, £5.99, May 1995, ISBN 0 09 945711 3

One of the most convincing inclusions in Granta’s list of the 20 best young British novelists, A.L. Kennedy has composed a distinctive voice out of youth and national identity. She was born in Dundee, and now lives in Glasgow; Scottishness informs her fiction. This is partly a matter of a characteristic introspection, the tradition of spiritual autobiography that generated the novel in the first place and has never, in the hard climate of Scotland, quite lost its original impetus:

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