This is Not About Me, By Janice Galloway

Here the novelist Janice Galloway turns her hand to writing a first memoir (albeit one which details just the first 12 years), which reads like a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman at times.

She paints vivid pictures of her childhood in 1950s Scotland - her mother who mistook her pregnancy for menopause, her father's death and her overbearing sister, Cora.

Her lyrically recalled, wincingly painful memories have the simplicity of a child's perception and the complexities of adult hindsight.

The memoir ends on a somewhat discordant note, with Galloway on the brink of angry adolescence, leaving the door open, and the reader hungry, for a second installment.