Paperback: Day, By Al Kennedy

AL Kennedy's fiction is usually set firmly inside the troubled parameters of a central character's head: an act of bravado that makes her short stories and novels both distinctive and brave, but also demanding of a reader's full attention. Her latest novel is told from the viewpoint of Alfred Day, an RAF tail-gunner employed as a film extra to relive his experiences as a British PoW. Revisiting the past is a complex process for this damaged 25-year-old, for whom military life was an answer of sorts. Kennedy's triumph is to translate Day's internal monologue into the language of near everyday.