Ross Raisin’s career began explosively when his debut, God’s Own Country – the story of a disturbed youth terrorising a community, in the tradition of William Trevor’s The Children of Dynmouth and Niall Griffiths’s Sheepshagger – won him nine prize shortlistings and the Sunday Times young writer of the year award. But as my boss once told me, being promoted is all very nice but then you have to do the work, and Raisin’s follow-up, Waterline, was a misstep. His third novel, A Natural, however, was one of the best books of 2017, though weirdly overlooked by prize juries.
His new novel, A Hunger, is its equal, and his most ambitious achievement yet. It reminded me of those cliched blurbs promising that a book “tells us what it means to be human” – which they rarely do. Yet here is one that does just that, encompassing work and family, desires and appetites, responsibility and identity.
