Mercy

I have always loved reading, have always been encouraged by my parents to read. I never really thought that there was a right and wrong thing to read until I was thirteen and had my books confiscated by Matron. She deemed Danielle Steel to be inappropriate (yet she left Judy Blume’s Forever, which to my mind was much racier….) reading material, despite the fact that I had been dispatched back to school with a job lot of said fiction by my mother. There wasn’t such a great array of teen fiction to read when I was thirteen, and in truth, I have always been thirty- it just took my body a while to catch up.

I got the English prize every year when I was at school. I won the Butler Literature Prize when I was in my final year- a prize that was open to the whole school and which I coveted throughout my tenure. It was presented to me by Jeffrey Archer (pre-prison) which sort of took the sheen off it. But I took my prize, and used it to buy books for my first year English degree at St. Andrews. That all ended in tears after a semester (a story for another day) and as I sped past the border back into England, I left behind critically-acclaimed, intellectually-stimulating literature. And have never looked back. These days, I want the best and newest paperback, at a cost of under three pounds, that Tesco’s has to offer.

Herewith the latest offering:

It has to be said that once you’ve read one Jodi Picoult, you’ve sort of read them all. But that doesn’t stop you reading them. I find there is a comfort in a format that is tried-and-tested. I like that there is always a happy ending. As happy an ending as can be expected from a book that begins with a murder and ends with a trial. i know that if I sat and thought about metaphors and themes, I’d see that there was a deeper more thought-provoking book underneath. But I don’t care. I want a book that I can sit and read in a day, that keeps me occupied on a flight, that wiles away a quiet afternoon in the garden with DH and dog. And this is it.