In Atkinson’s latest, Started Early, Took My Dog, the plot is as pleasingly intricate as ever and just as heavily populated with beautifully summed-up characters. So they go on forking over prizes to such tiresome writers as Salman Rushdie and ignoring people like Atkinson, who can write better prose in their sleep than Rushdie could if he were strapped to his computer for 100 years. Somewhere along the line, around the time Jackson Brodie began turning up as a character in her novels, Atkinson got classified in the mystery sections of bookstores and newspaper book reviews.īooker judges wouldn’t dream of acknowledging that such a genre as crime fiction even exists. She started out writing conventional novels, conventional in general form and intent that is, that were pretty much family dramas. One reason Kate Atkinson will never win the Booker is the crime novel thing. Actually it told a bunch of great hanging-in stories under one roof. It told a touching and funny story about characters hanging in there. I would have given the prize two years ago to Jane Gardam for Old Filth. I want my novels to be about people, preferably people who bear up in the face of much angst and still manage a joke or two. I’m against novels for readers more than 12 that feature animals, especially animals that speak English. I never would have given the prize to Yann Martel and the book featuring the talkative tiger in the boat or whatever it was that The Life of Pi was all about. Or something that feels like an allegory. But, too bad, that’s not what usually wins the Booker.īooker committees like stuff that’s either ponderous or precious. She writes absorbing novels in clear prose with just the right number of jokes, tears and mysteries. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.If I were on the committee that hands out the Man Booker Prize - dream on! - I would already have voted to give Kate Atkinson a couple of cheques. One moment of madness is all it takes for Tracy's humdrum world to be turned upside down, the tedium of everyday life replaced by fear and danger at every turn. A day like any other for security chief Tracy Waterhouse, until she makes a purchase she hadn't bargained for. All three characters learn that the past is never history and that no good deed goes unpunished. Witnesses to Tracy's Faustian exchange in the Merrion Centre in Leeds are Tilly, an elderly actress teetering on the brink of her own disaster, and Jackson Brodie who has returned to his home county in search of someone else's roots.

Kate atkinson started early