Giller winner, Booker shortlist. Yeah, so I have no idea what the heck this book was about, which more or less confirms that I should avoid whatever won the Giller (This is actually recency bias: I just looked up previous years, and see works I've loved by both Omar El Akkad and Esi Edugyan). The writing itself is excellent, and made the difference between me sticking with the book rather than bailing after two chapters (also it's only two hundred pages): it's very much stream of consciousness from our point of view character, who is an unreliable narrator, and also has a flexible relationship with the nature of self and possibly also reality. The problem for me was that this ended up being so densely interior that I couldn't work out what was actually happening, or indeed if anything was. And maybe nothing needed to be happening, but either way it ended up being just shy of two hundred pages inside the head someone with zero self-esteem musing on why everyone's right to hate her, and possibly being so miserable to be around that she drove everyone near her insane. It just wasn't worth it to me in the end.

Blurb: A finely-tuned, unsettling novel that confirms Bernstein as one of the most exciting voices of her generation.
Me: Man, I still don't get literary fiction.