Her name is Hannah Luckraft, and she is an alcoholic. Not that the narrator of A.L. Kennedy's latest novel would ever tell you that herself. This isn't because she's in denial about her drinking - much of the time she finds it quite hard to think or talk about anything else - or the damage it causes, but because she isn't in the habit of stating things so baldly. Paradise, like Kennedy's previous fiction, is wary of blunt declarations of fact. Her stories tend to begin not merely in medias res, but in the middle of a character's train of thought, too. 'Rockaway and the Draw', for example, the first story in the 1997 collection Original Bliss, begins: 'She was thinking, only thinking. Because it felt good. You can make someone deaf with a pencil. Just put it in their ear and shove.'

LRB 7 October 2004 | PDF Download