Two female authors to try

This week I read two books by entirely different women writers, back to back. If you haven't read either of these authors before, I urge you to try them. These books are great introductions to them.

First, Sophie Kinsella's Twenties Girl. You probably know that Sophie Kinsella is the pen name of Madeleine Wickham, who had published several stand-alone novels before adopting the pseudonym for her very different Shopaholic series of novels. Since I finally read the first novel of that series earlier this year she has become one of my favourite authors. Twenties Girl  is one of her more recent novels, which she chose to write under the pseudonym, presumably because in style it is more similar to the Shopaholic novels. And perhaps also because Sophie Kinsella is such a well-known name now.
Don't be deceived by the lightness of touch of her writing. The novels may be humorous in tone - and they are often very, very funny indeed - but they always turn out to be about something other than what you expect. With her first person viewpoint and present tense narrative, you are inside the heroine's head, slammed up against the present, experiencing it all as it happens. Twenties Girl is a very funny and original ghost story, but it's also about mortality and the alienation and helplessness of old age, with two good-old-fashioned love stories wound through it for good measure.

The second one was Anne Enright's The Gathering. This novel won the Booker Prize in 2007 and I'm embarrassed that it's taken me until now to read any of her novels. I was prompted to by a recent edition of Book Club on Radio 4 when it was the featured book.  The story is tragic, centred on the gathering at home in Dublin of a large, scattered family for the funeral of the narrator's brother, Liam, which provokes her to try to pin down and record long-ago, half-remembered events in her childhood which might have started him on the path to his death. The writing is hard and clear; very very funny at times, shockingly matter-of-fact in others. There's no way I can do justice to the book: just go and pick it up. I'm reading her more recent The Forgotten Waltz now.

By the way, I picked both of these up from my local library. If you don't use yours, please try to do so. We must support our libraries!