Adam Thirlwell, one of two writers from Granta’s 2003 list to appear again in the 2013 selection, contributes ‘Slow Motion’, whose protagonist, Edison Lo, who wakes up in a motel room next to a girl he’s picked up, and returns later that day to find her dead. I didn’t check the biographical note until after I’d finished reading Thirlwell’s piece, and so was not aware that ‘Slow Motion’ was a novel extract. It actually works quite well as a discrete piece, though I’m not sure how well Edison’s narrative voice – dense, but woven from banalities and pop-culture imagery – would fare at novel-length. It’s just fine for these twenty pages, though.

This is part of a series of posts on Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4. Click here to read the rest.