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Guest Editor, Spring 2021 - Guy Gavriel Kay
Each quarter we ask a best-selling and much loved author to sit in the LoveReading spotlight as our Guest Editor. Their job is to pick five books, these can sit within a genre or theme, or just be particular favourites. You may think that a relatively simple task, but how to pick, how to choose from all those wonderful books out there!
Guy Gavriel Kay is a book world great and a particular favourite of the LoveReading team, his latest novel
A Brightness Long Ago was a Liz Robinson Pick of the Month and LoveReading Star Book. He also appeared as our LoveReading August 2019 Author in the Picture. He writes books that sit somewhere between historical and fantasy, another reviewer described them rather perfectly as “historical fiction with a quarter turn to the fantastic”.
February was another locked down month with a curfew in Quebec, and I was at home going nowhere. It snowed a lot. I saw a total of three other human beings in the whole month. The prevailing mood of this pandemic for many of us is “other people have it worse, but this sure sucks.” I read a perfectly reasonable seventeen books, and many of them were really excellent, which is always cheering.
This is the story of a young man with enough money to live on in London for a year and try to write, who entirely fails to achieve anything. It’s a comedy, though it is very sad, and you can see here the beginnings of the class consciousness which will make so much of Sharp’s later work so excellent. I enjoyed reading it, though I wouldn’t call it good, exactly. It also surprised me that it was 1932; it’s much more a book of the 1920s in feel. For Sharp completists, I suppose. Don’t start here. But I am excited to have so much new to me Sharp available as ebooks.