Since the cover here tells us that this novel features blackmail, with a judge as the central character, there is an immediate suggestion of a departure into the more populist area of the crime thriller. Oh, the woes of categorisation for books and authors who defy such a thing, as Dunmore does. Yes, there’s a judge; yes, there’s blackmail of a kind, but any expectation of cheap cut-and-slash will be disappointed. What this blue-eyed boy has in common with the best of crime thrillers is a brooding sense of menace, although the central threat is not death, but moral carnage Comparisons with the crime genre are not odious.

The house in which Dunmore sets her tale is the kind of house where a murder might well occur; an isolated house surrounded by sea and marsh, which begs to feature in a shock/horror headline.
Inside it and inside the actions of her characters, Dunmore explores the slow-burning preliminaries to the kind of violence possible in the most ordinary and controlled of lives. Helen Dunmore is a winner of the Orange Prize and an acclaimed author of five literary novels as well as short stories (The Love of Fat Men, now published in paperback), poetry and novels for children. My guess is that sooner or later the digital generation will follow. www.albany.edu/writers-inst/mailer.htmlPotted Norman Mailer biography www.reedbooks.co.uk/docs/fiction/trnspot/author.htmThe trainspotting home page www.pulpfiction /rave/welsh.htmlAnother Irvine Welsh page. It has links for every subject in the Trainspotting universe from Iggy Pop to heroin-addict sites.Some have already said that Welsh has moved on from being a writer to being something altogether different He has already embraced the Ecstasy generation. His publishers, displaying an admirable understanding of the writer’s natural constituency, have constructed a truly epic Trainspotting website.

You’ll recognise the site design immediately because it’s the same as the film posters which have already become (the world being just a little too postmodern these days) transcendental classics The site, however, is put together with a real passion. It’s the sort of thing that could just as easily have been printed in a brochure.Compare that with Welsh. And anyway, he says, what’s the point in moaning when you’re making loads of money?

There’s more to this than just a straightforward clash of views In Mailer’s heyday, text was sacrosanct. It had been commissioned, sweated over, polished, edited, printed and marketed.