Rowena Macdonald

Shady characters

A great deal of time in Neel Mukherjee’s A Life Apart and Max Schaefer’s Children of the Sun is spent in gents’ public toilets — cottaging being a key feature of both debuts — and yet such is the elegance and intelligence of their prose, the reader comes away feeling educated rather than soiled.

  • A Life Apart

    Neel Mukherjee

    Constable, pp. 128

  • Children of the Sun

    Max Schaefer

    Granta, pp. 387

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