Enid Roach

I have, however, found the time to read a novel. Patrick Hamilton's The Slaves of Solitude. It is extraordinary bleak - reading it is like being broken over someone's knee like a tiny piece of kindling. Any novel in which the heroine's first name is not revealed until 160 pages in - and you don't even notice - is doing something right. It chronicles the relentless self-sabotage of a woman walling herself slowly into loneliness, spinsterhood, penury and, possibly death. I've never read such an utterly forceful account of the sheer insidious poison of self-doubt, and pessimism, and self-imposed victimhood.