Postscript

I seem to have spent the whole day narrowly avoiding a minor meltdown, for no evident reason, though I definitely wasn't feeling well yesterday either - and have made myself feel very bad by skipping the workouts I should have done, which is doubly foolish because doing at least one of them would almost certainly have made me feel better! The weather in New York right now is not conducive to bike-riding, it must be said, though I intend to get out for my long run tomorrow afternoon even if it is snowing...

But now that the short list has been announced for the Young Lions Fiction Award, I am free to say that this was the award I was reading for earlier in the year. I won't say anything about books I read and didn't like (I have studiously avoided mentioning them here!), and the structure is such that one hasn't necessarily read all of the finalists, so I can only say that the two I did read from this list of five, John Brandon's Citrus County and Patricia Engel's Vida, were both highly worthwhile (my personal preference was slightly for the latter, but both are really worthy of recognition). And the book that I was startled didn't make it onto the short list (but it is the nature of group decision-making and consensus that things go this way) was one that I truly loved, Rosecrans Baldwin's You Lost Me There. Highly recommended!