The award-winning playwright’s impressive novel sees five lives unravel after a car crash
Literary fiction is full of characters who are writers. Writers, and people who act as stand-ins for writers (musicians, artists, academics); children who are destined to be writers (articulate outsiders) and the kind of middle-class, well-educated people writers tend to know. It is not what the world looks like, and it makes me tired.
That kind of insularity is not something debut novelist Barney Norris can be accused of. Norris is a young playwright whose first full-length play, Visitors, won him the Critics’ Circle and Off West End awards for most promising playwright, and nominations for several more. Set in Salisbury, Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain looks well beyond the literary intelligentsia’s world, describing with great humanity five ordinary lives, and coming close, as it does so, to being a “state of the nation” novel – albeit one with none of the bombast the term usually implies.
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