James Clammer has worked at many kinds of jobs, including plumbing. He now lives in Sussex, where he writes in a shed at the bottom of a cliff. His first novel, Why I Went Back — a work of YA fiction compared with Susan Cooper and Alan Garner — was nominated for the Carnegie Medal and longlisted for the Branford Boase Award.
Insignificance is Clammer’s first novel for adults.
At the Guardian Clammer tagged ten novels that, like Insignificance, take place in a single day, including:
The Mezzanine by Nicholson BakerRead about another entry on the list.
Tightening the circadian focus even further, this story is packed, crammed, shoehorned within a single lunch break. Here the ingenious device of the extended footnote animates the internal life of young office worker Howie. Between bouts of “escalatorial happiness” ascending to his workplace, he ruminates on fraying shoelaces, the wonders of perforated paper, ice cubes, Marcus Aurelius and many other micro-matters. A treasure chest of the quotidian.
The Mezzanine is among David Moloney's seven books about confinement and the need to escape, Aaron Robertson's seven books in which very little happens, and Alex Clark's eight best books set over twenty-hours.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
