A, B & E by Marc Nash

On the run from her psycho gangster husband, Karen Dash (not her true born name) washes up in a sun-soaked Greek holiday resort, where she spends her time hanging out in tourist bars, hotel bedrooms and the like, getting pissed, getting laid and telling (possibly tall) stories. Meanwhile, back in the rainy old UK, a harried NHS nurse cultivates her resentment of her bloody awful patients. But this is more a novel about the telling as it is about the tale: it’s about the “voices” of the two protagonists, you might say – the way they “talk” (or should that be write); allusively, discursively, wordily, and the minor digressions, the little anecdotes/factoids/opinions that pepper the novel. This is a fun text, erudite, witty, sometimes playful. The two protagonists are not perhaps entirely convincing: Miss Dash seems a little too wise and cynical (and, let’s be honest, too much the literati/intellectual, albeit of the “lumpen” kind) to make an altogether convincing moll. It also has to be said it can be a little difficult to tell the two protagonists apart, their “voices” are very similar, even if their situations are not. If you enjoy “writerly” novels which emphasise the pleasures of the text over narrative and even, to a certain extent, character, then A, B & E could be for you.