Meaghan Delahunt / Features / Untitled Books

"We come into these stories as if we've entered a ransacked house, or encountered a natural disaster. From the fragments, a whole world is created. Strange, unsettling and original."

Photograph: ©Anna Reid

Meaghan Delahunt

Meaghan Delahunt is the author of The Red Book and In the Blue House which was nominated for the Orange Prize, won the Saltire First Book Prize, a Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Prize and a regional Commonwealth Prize. Her award-winning short stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio Four. She lectures in Creative Writing at the University of St Andrews in Edinburgh.

Marguerite Duras: The Sea Wall

A haunting novel about a poor colonial family in French Indochina in the first half of the twentieth century. The translation I read was published in 1952. The character of 'Ma' looms as one of the most terrifying matriarchs in literature as she pimps out her daughter, indulges her feckless son, and schemes to build a sea wall to keep the floods from ruining them completely. A compelling look at the dynamics of family, colonisation, and survival in Duras' wonderful, lucid prose. A modernist gem.

Janet Malcolm: In the Freud Archives

Janet Malcolm is a brilliant non-fiction writer and investigative journalist. She creates compelling narratives and has a real eye and ear for character. Here she turns her attention to key figures in the psychoanalytic world battling for control of Sigmund Freud's legacy. The level of transference, projection and neediness among the Freudian acolytes and gurus makes the average family look functional. The pace is thrilling. Read it.

Lydia Davis: The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

I keep dipping into this volume and just love her pared-down micro-stories. So refreshing to see someone writing like this - oblique, elliptical and most importantly, short. We come into these stories as if we've entered a ransacked house, or encountered a natural disaster. From the fragments, a whole world is created. Strange, unsettling and original.

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To the Island by Meaghan Delahunt is published by Granta in June 2011

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Thursday, 24 March, 2011