Here's a funny (or not so funny) little postscript to our reading group discussion about A M Homes's The End of Alice - a novel concerning the murder of a child by a paedophile - and food for thought about the power of fiction. I have been in Wales, and yesterday evening, my final evening and a beautiful one, I was walking with my partner on the Anglesey coast path. It was my birthday; the walk...

In the very week that A M Homes won the Women's Prize for Fiction, for her wonderful May We Be Forgiven, our reading group happened to be discussing her earlier novel, The End of Alice, narrated, like Nabokov's Lolita, by an incarcerated paedophile murderer. It's an important book, I think, but for our group its power was somewhat negated by the fact that several members found it just too...

Huge congratulations to A M Homes for winning the Women's Prize for Fiction for May We Be Forgiven, her hilarious, stomach-churning yet moving depiction of the implosion of the American Dream via the disintegrating life of a hapless historian trying to rehabilitate the reputation of Richard Nixon. Homes is that really precious thing, most particularly in this age of fearful sensibilities: a...