Lloyd-Barlow’s protagonist observes the ‘undisturbed grease’ of a magpie’s wing. 

Photograph: Andrew Howe

All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow review – a mesmerising debut

Longlisted for the Booker prize, this is a darkly vivacious tale of family, fraught friendship and neurodivergence

Booker prize reveals ‘original and thrilling’ 2023 longlist

James Smart
Thursday 31 August 2023

V

iktoria Lloyd-Barlow’s Booker-longlisted debut begins on a bright, cool summer’s morning in the 1980s. A woman called Sunday whispers a Sicilian proverb, admires the fields that rise above her Lake District home and notices a stranger lying on next door’s lawn. This is Vita, her smart, inky clothes hanging on her elegant frame, her hands raised skywards, “as though waiting for expected gifts”. All the Little Bird-Hearts is a sharp, watchful account of the intense friendship that builds between these two very different women, and its fraught aftermath.

Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile by Adelle Stripe review / Mischief amid bleakness

 

Andrea Dunbar, photographed at home on the Buttershaw estate,
Bradford in the early 1980s
while writing her play Rita, Sue and Bob Too. 
Photograph: Don Mcphee

BOOK OF THE YEAR

Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile by Adelle Stripe review – mischief amid bleakness

Troubled playwright Andrea Dunbar is brought to life in an affectionate, unsentimental debut novel

Alex Preston’s best fiction of 2017

James Smart

Friday 18 August 2017

A

ndrea Dunbar’s teeth weren’t black. “Brush ’em every day, twice,” she indignantly says while scanning a tabloid profile that paints her as “a genius from the slums”. Dunbar, a playwright whose raw tales of working-class life took her from a Bradford estate to the Royal Court and the multiplexes, is never comfortable with the attention her talent brings; Stripe’s affectionate, unsentimental debut novel reveals a young woman who struggled constantly with her writing and the people around her. Dunbar grows up on the Buttershaw estate, a place of gossip, daytime drinking and waiting for the giro. Even Bradford feels like another world, but Dunbar’s early writing, encouraged by a teacher after she has a miscarriage at 15, is impossibly exotic to the London literati. Stripe tells of her success via Rita, Sue and Bob Too, as well as alcoholism, domestic violence and self-sabotage. Stripe’s narration can feel a little flat compared with her dialogue, which snaps and prickles and brings a talented, troubled woman to life. But she gives an important story a real spark: Dunbar’s energy and mischief bubble in the bleakness.

 Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile is published by Wrecking Ball.

THE GUARDIAN