David Robinson

UNREADABLE. That’s the first thing people notice about WH Auden in Polly Clark’s superlative debut novel. Clark’s description of him on her opening page reads: "His blue eyes flicker with a lively intelligence that animates all his features. It’s as if one can see the thoughts playing in his mind. But this is an illusion; his friends will find that they never really know him. Wystan is that terrible, isolating thing: unreadable.”

WITH me, it’s my Auntie Shirley, and the one bit of her life that we never knew about until we saw a photo of her looking at her wedding ring and standing next to an impossibly handsome Polish soldier in a strange wartime town. With my wife, it’s her Auntie May, in East Cork, who pretended almost to her dying day that she was her son’s elder sister.

LIKE Arran, the isle of Fascaray, the setting for Annalena McAfee’s comic novel about Scots and Scottishness, is “Scotland in miniature”. And if the country’s geography has been boiled down to a single fictitious Hebridean island, so too has its history.

‘TAKE a seat and wait for your number to be called.” There is, in most of our lives, at least some small echo of what life as an asylum seeker must be like. Except when our number is finally called, we are just picking up a prescription, or seeing a doctor, or paying a parking permit, and not desperate to convince the person on the other side of the counter to believe us, as our life could be over if they don’t.

THERE’S no shortage, if you’re truly desperate, of TV shows to instruct you on how to tidy up your home. Making Space, The Life Laundry, The Big Spring Clean, Hoarders, Get Your House in Order: each has its own "de-clutter expert", which is usually just another way of saying a person with enough common sense to realise that it’s about time to throw out those 40 tins of violet paint bought 20 years ago because they were in a sale, those gorilla fancy dress costumes that no longer fit their pensioner owners and those thigh-high leather boots that seemed a good idea at the time.