This year’s Man Booker prize winner, Hilary Mantel, has chosen This is How as one of her books of the year!
In a piece published in the Guardian, Mantel, the author of Wolf Hall, wrote:
Mysteriously underrated among this year’s novels was MJ Hyland’s This Is How; but then, Hyland’s talent in itself is mysterious. How does she, while fixing our attention on external events, make us so complicit in her characters’ internal worlds: so stickily enthralled, so nervously guilty? Patrick Oxtoby, the main character here, is a young criminal who claims to have very few emotions, yet his violent, dislocated story arouses strong emotion in the reader. Maria Hyland is like no one else writing today; her work is spare, ungiving, a challenge. At the same time, it is deeply humane.
The Guardian’s best books of 2009 list can be read here>
