Poppyland

D. J. Taylor has written thirteen novels, including Trespass (1998) and Derby Day (2011), both of which were long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and three volumes of short stories, most recently Stewkey Blues (2022) which won the Fiction Award in the 2022 East Anglian Book Awards. His non-fiction includes Orwell: The Life, which won the 2003 Whitbread Prize for Biography, and its successor, Orwell: The New Life (2023). He lives in Norwich with his wife, the novelist Rachel Hore.

There is an irresistible modesty to Taylor’s prose that makes his touches of humour leap out even more viscerally from the page. In “Special Needs”, he describes reality TV as a “spangled approximation” of life. I underlined bursts of brilliance like these throughout.But something remains impenetrable about Poppyland; its figures remain attenuated, their motivations obscured. At the end of “Drowning in Hunny”, the narrator describes a look between two people as “not quite contemptuous, or kindly, but . . . something else altogether, that hung tantalisingly in the air between them, like the scent of the cooking oil”. It goes some way to capture what I felt as a reader. Leaving Poppyland, I was left with a curious aftertaste, of something rather sad and unknowable, but also moreish and nourishing — something remorselessly real.