![]() A demographer might call the region sparsely inhabited in fact it has about the same population as Melton Mowbray, spread over an area the size of Italy. That world looms large in the novel, for Wayne grows up in Labrador, on Canada's eastern coast. This is a quiet, inward-looking treatment of a quiet, inward-looking person who is, in a way, more human than most, being man and woman in one, yet who feels completely alone in a small world. Annabel takes a fresh approach: it eschews the dark humour of Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex, or, in less direct treatments, the gruesomeness of Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory, the epic sweep of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, the inventive intricacy of Ursula K Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. ![]() ![]() Not many authors have tackled issues of intersexuality or variations on what used to be called, in less tactful times, hermaphroditism. It didn't win those, but its delicate treatment of a sensitive subject charmed readers and judges alike. ![]() Kathleen Winter, a Canadian writer, has done well with her debut novel: it has made the Orange prize shortlist here as well as the shortlists for Canada's three biggest fiction awards. ![]()
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