Max Porter

Worked as a bookseller and then an editor before writing anything of his own, and the first book is barely a novel at all.

Grief Is the Thing with Feathers puts a widowed father, two small boys and a crow from Ted Hughes's poetry in a London flat, and moves between verse, fable and plain speech. It is about ninety pages and knows exactly how long it can hold that register.

Lanny went to an English village and let the language of the whole place speak. Porter writes grief and childhood without the sentiment that usually attaches to both.