The Quiet Woman
by Christopher Priest (Bloomsbury, 1990)
audiobook read by Jane Collingwood (Bolinda, 2016)
Granted, speculative fiction should contrast the everyday with the unreal; but Priest takes ‘everyday’ to banal extremes, and his ‘unreal’ is merely a half-baked melange of surveillance state and mental breakdown. A book-length, autological lament/sneer at the state of the publishing industry.