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Barry the Military Contractor

Adam Mars-Jones’ novel Batlava Lake mixes Gardeners’ Question Time with the discovery of mass graves in Kosovo, in a story of the late 1990s.

The imperative to ‘write what you know’ is a mantra of creative writing workshops, so it’s hardly surprising that writers of one kind or another are over-represented among the protagonists of contemporary novels. But there remains something to be said for getting inside the head of someone who is not like you, and that’s exactly […]

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