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The author captures the comedy and cruelty in this tenderly written coming-of-age tale
his Women’s prize-nominated novel from Marcia Hutchinson is told from the perspective of Mercy Hanson, a girl born in Bradford in 1962 to a mother she adores and a father she fears.
We follow Mercy, their spirited fifth child, from birth through her toddler years to primary education. There she discovers books for the first time, in which she finds delicious escape. In her first week at school, she flees the classroom and runs all the way home after a teacher inadvertently kicks her in the forehead and then denies it.
This prompts her God-fearing mother to march to school and into the classroom where she threatens the teacher with hellfire if she touches her daughter again. But Mercy’s mother is unable to protect herself or her children from her short-tempered husband who is “very tall, a proper giant” and smokes Capstan Full Strength cigarettes. Mercy’s father slaps her in her crib when she cries, and viciously beats her mother.
The narrator is Hutchinson, whose reading draws out the comic and the unhappy elements of Mercy’s story and who moves seamlessly between her young protagonist’s Yorkshire tones and her mother’s Jamaican Patois. Tenderly written, with moments of sweetness and levity, the novel is named after the stair on which Mercy sits at home, clutching her beloved toy Dolly and surveying the goings on in the household.
Her child’s-eye view of the world is effective here not only in showing us the preoccupations that shape childhood but in revealing the cost of the cruelty inflicted by adults. The creator of the hit millennial TV series Girls narrates her memoir in which she reflects on her career, controversies, relationships and addictions along with multiple health challenges which include OCD, early menopause and endometriosis.
Aaron Willis and Robin Wilcock are the narrators of this novel by the Life of Pi author. It tells of a Canadian classicist who stumbles across a lost epic poem about the Trojan war which is told from the perspective of a common soldier.
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