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Books

First novel choice: do you prefer your author on a skateboard, or in a vineyard?

Keith Miller is impressed by the latest first novels - but deplores the way publishers oversell them

14 March 2015

9:00 AM

14 March 2015

9:00 AM

I’m not sure I know what the mark of merit is in a first novel, any more than in a fourth or a 14th. If nothing else, though, it’s surely an opportunity to make a new friend, to lock eyes with a stranger across a crowded room. So it was, one enchanted evening in February, that I carted a hodload of literary debuts across the threshold.

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As the US decides, so can you

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