Happy Monday, everyone.

Welcome to Issue 3 of the 2PoundPaperback – your weekly dose of book-related insights, book news, and updates on my writing projects.

What I'm Reading:

Your Fault by Andrew Cowan.

Premise: Each chapter presents one year in the childhood of a working class boy, Peter. While told in the present, it is narrated from Peter's future – and so the temporal setting is (arguably) the present moment of memory. It is also deeply about place, and the built environment, with Peter's childhood occurring in an industrial British town in the 1960s.

Points of interest: This bowled me over. It is probably the best novel I've read this year. Your Fault is written entirely in the second person, which is probably the most difficult POV to pull off. The effect of this, over a novel length (plus the sheer precision of detail), is hypnotic. I left Your Fault feeling that the memories contained were my own.

Peter's childhood is not, per se, a happy one, and the narrative voice is often brutal and unsparing. Yet, it is just as often funny, at the same time as being brutal, which perhaps is the most impressive thing.