Louise Welsh

I mean, he really believes this.

But at the same time, what the regret is about through the book, it seems to me, is that he never quite pushed...

things far enough.

There's a whole load of things he didn't in his personal relationships.

And even he says, at one point he says, I could have been more radical in my songwriting.

This is a book with a very interesting end.

And I'm still not sure about it.

We obviously can't actually describe it.

But...

I found it, in a way, really effective because it's one of those endings that comes as a total surprise and about three seconds later you think, oh, of course, I can see this being set up.

But it is interestingly tender-hearted, isn't it?

We've been talking about Espadere Street by Ian Banks.

And to my choice of a good read now, which is a novel published in 1917 by Edith Wharton.

And it's really a quite unusual Edith Wharton novel because quite often she writes about New York high society.

And this is very much not that.

The novel is set over one summer in a dreary little one street village somewhere in New England.

And the only pretensions to high society come from a woman called Miss Hatchard.

And the other bit of grandness, I suppose, is a lawyer called Mr Royal, a rather broken down, sleazy lawyer.

Our heroine, 17-year-old Charity Royal, is Mr Royal's adopted ward.

She's a very beautiful, rather proud young woman.