Accidents in the home

This first novel, widely and favourably reviewed in national papers (e.g. Guardian and TLS) and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, is structured in an innovative way that stretches and experiments with the novel form. A series of linked stories all of which, apart from the last, could stand alone, are built into a sequence around the same characters and themes (originality). This innovative methodology isn't merely a surface arrangement; at the heart of the intellectual conception of the work are important ideas about accident and design, an emphasis on the fragmentary and contingent, and how we may or may not choose to read the contingent (i.e. the separate fragments of story) as adding up to a whole meaning (i.e. a novel). Through its material - the thick detail of particular lives in one family - the novel explores its theme of choices and consequences and the random (significance). It recapitulates certain familiar novelistic conventions (the dissatisfied wife, the selfish mother) but explores them in new directions.(rigour). Published in USA by Holt, ISBN-13: 9780641727313