All Quiet on the Orient Express

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Goldsmiths, University of London: Goldsmiths Prize shortlist – six works of fiction at its most novel, http://www.gold.ac.uk/news/goldsmiths-prize-shortlist-2015/. I will try to read more by Mills. Engaging and insightful, showing me a perspective on human nature that illuminates the unfamiliar.**

I've recorded everything under distinct headings so that I can remember all of this when the rest of the Book Club members get around to reading this. The headings are:

in a hard gravel yard. As I came up the slope I was aware of the house looming above me, overlooking the yard, the road and the fields below. I passed the lower corner of the building and scuffed some gravel with my boots. out. He'd be in proper overalls as well, whereas I was clad only in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. My equipment consisted of no more than a brush and a tin of paint. Obviously an amateur. Someone who'd been roped The nearby town only has two pubs, and in the off-season the locals take over again, meaning they are less obliging of the outsider's needs and wants. Mills has the skill to make his dialogue ring completely true and at the same time to freight the most apparently banal comment with surreal overtones. His transparent, elegant prose is deceptively simple and a pleasure to read.” Nanja Labi in Time wrote, "In this creepy, deadpan novel by a nominee for Britain's Booker Prize, nothing much happens—except that one man slowly, painlessly, surrenders his life". [3]

Magnus Mills (born in 1954 in Birmingham) is an English fiction writer and bus driver. He is best known for his first novel, The Restraint of Beasts, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and praised by Thomas Pynchon. The arrival of Magnus Mills on the British literary scene is extraordinarily refreshing. He represents a genuinely avant garde voice who has breathed new life into the genre (if it can be called a genre) by flouting all expectations of what a novel can be about... Mills is genuinely unique, but if he is to be placed anywhere in the jigsaw of literary history, he will have to slot between Albert Camus and Enid Blyton. [He is] oneof the handful of British writers to work in a unique fictional universe. For this, Mills is to be treasured and revered. You cannot ask more of a book than for it to make the familiar seem fresh, strange and scary. In a modest, sneaky way, Mills pulls this off better than any other writer at work today. -- The Independent on Sunday, 19 September 1999 Well, factory's probably the wrong word,' I said. `It was recycling oil drums. You know, cleaning them out, getting rid of the dents, painting them up.' However, I was aware that my supply of baked beans was running low, so I decided to take a short walk along the side of the lake and get some more. There was a place called Millfold about a mile away at the I've got to say it was strangely readable despite the intentionally sparse dialogue and simple narrative style. The author had a clever way of putting little odd things in here and there that made me want to keep reading till the end- to find out if there were answers (and there were. At the very, very end. To a few questions anyway).

He seemed content with this answer, and moved aside. Then he followed me into the shop and slipped behind the counter. Well, I was only there temporary but I should think you'd need at least a hundred to make it worth while.'