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Books

What E.M. Forster didn't do

A review of Arctic Summer, by Damon Galgut. Portraying the novelist as a fusty, virginal defeatist doesn't make for thrilling fiction

8 March 2014

9:00 AM

8 March 2014

9:00 AM

Arctic Summer Damon Galgut

Atlantic Books, pp.352, £17.99, ISBN: 9780857897183

‘On the whole I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings whom you think are sadly mistaken,’ said Penelope Fitzgerald in 1987. The South African novelist Damon Galgut has reversed this formula — with mixed results. He has written a novel about a fellow novelist, E.M.

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