20.05.12

Doug Johnstone, author

My favourite books this year all come from America. The best thing I’ve read is a novel only just published over here, but originally written in 1996. Matthew F Jones’s A Single Shot (Mulholland Press, £9.99) is an utterly compelling piece of American country backwater noir, a believable and heartbreaking tragedy about a man who accidentally shoots a teenage girl while out poaching deer. He subsequently makes some catastrophic decisions and descends into a world of psychological torture and a kind of madness. The prose is sparse and precise yet somehow also elegant. The second thing that blew me away this year was another American novel originally written a while ago, but only now getting published over here. Drive (No Exit Press, £7.99) by James Sallis is the basis for the recent Ryan Gosling movie, and is as clinical and brutal a piece of prose as you’ll read, a skeletal story of a getaway driver that nevertheless manages to pack a bigger punch than ten more linguistically extrovert novels. And my final recommendation is Megan Abbott’s The End Of Everything (Picador, £7.99), the compulsive, dream-like tale of a missing teenage girl, an emotionally complex examination of burgeoning female sexuality that lives long in the memory.

Source: Herald Scotland