A trip down memory lane

Azzopardi was shortlisted for the 2000 Booker Prize for her debut novel; a stunning exploration of the secrets of a working class Maltese family living in Cardiff in the 1960s.

Her second is no less preoccupied with people living on the edge: her elderly narrator, Winnie, has spent her life belonging nowhere. First evacuated to the country as a child during the Second World War, and later surviving rough on the streets, she is haunted by a patchwork of memories that she's barely able to make sense of.

Winnie's dislocated narrative is rich with fragmented imagery, but also neatly lacking in self pity, her story giving ambitious voice to a peripheral existence defined by its lack of identity.