Murder in the Dark - Margaret Atwood

Advantages: You could read and savour them one at a time
Disadvantages: Some of them seem almost too short

Having hungrily devoured several of Margaret Atwood's novels, from 'The Handmaid's Tale' through 'Surfacing' to 'Alias Grace', I was intrigued to see 'Murder in the Dark' described as a collection of 'short fictions and prose poems'. I make several long bus journeys a week, and if you're sandwiched between giggling schoolgirls and someone booming down their mobile phone while the guy at the back is singing along to Alice Cooper on his ipod, it's ...
...page novel. But these little gems take just a couple of minutes each to read and each demands to be savoured before you go on to the next one. 'Autobiography' is a description of a landscape that starts with a blue line and goes on to scan a lake, a white cliff and a forest. The piece ends with the idea that the landscape ceased to be a landscape not because of a visual feature but because of a smell - the smell of a half-eaten carcass of a deer. ... Read review