One of the books which my boyfriend bought for me with my vouchers on Thursday was ‘Engleby’ by Sebastian Faulks. I knew nothing about the novel at all and bought it purely on the strength of the author’s name. When I did A Level English at school, our specialist subject which we had to study for three hours a week over two years was the literature of World War One, and the school library had a permanent waiting list of people who had requested the sole copy of ‘Birdsong’. That novel was too long for us all to read together in class but pretty much all of us read it in our own time, primarily I suspect because the teacher had mentioned that there was sex in it. (more…)