The Outcast - Sadie Jones

All the signs about The Outcast were good. Mariella raved about it on The Book Show, Richard & Judy had selected it as one of their Summer Reads, and, as if that wasn't enough, Sadie Jones had just been handed the Costa First Novel award for it.

I was convinced I was going to love it, and then I started reading it and then I thought I hated it and wouldn't be able to get past the first chapter and then I got over the fact that she used 'and then' all the time, and then I finished it in three sittings.

I hope it's not damning it with faint praise when I say that it was alright. It was 440 perfectly readable pages about a traumatised young man living in stifling post-war suburbia: but I think the reviewers might have been getting a bit high over-excited when they started calling it the new Atonement.