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In this spare and brooding novel with quite a bit of sex and violence Baker creates

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In this spare and brooding novel, with quite a bit of sex and violence, Baker creates a semi-rural world every bit as raw as the killing fields Stephen has left behind. EHHell Hath No Fury Edited by Anna Holmes (ROBSON £9.99 (375pp))More revealing than a love letter is the anguished adieu sent at the end of an affair. Anna Holmes's anthology of farewells will make comforting reading for anyone in the throes of composing that final hurt e-mail. Even, he would have us believe, after an affectionate lunch with the smiling sexagenarian, himself.

"She was clearly one of those delightful women", concludes Wilson "who was prepared to go to bed with almost anyone". A pupil of Bayley's, Wilson was adopted by the couple as one of their "toy children". While rating Murdoch's fiction ("better than anything written in England in my life-time"), but not her philosophy ("secular sermonising"), Wilson blames Bayley for her descent into domestic squalor. That Wilson's reminiscences reveal as much about himself as his subject - his undergraduate religiosity, his failed marriage to the Shakespearean scholar Katherine Duncan Jones - makes the book a more entertaining read still.

Whichever book grabs the £50,000 cheque next month, it will not be another one-tune sermon or soliloquy strung out to novel length Sometimes, in fiction, less isn't more Sometimes, more is more.. Dead or alive, Iris Murdoch has always been the subject of high table tittle-tattle. Iris Murdoch by AN Wilson (ARROW £7.99 (276pp)) Dead or alive, Iris Murdoch has always been the subject of high table tittle-tattle. She was a woman of huge appetites - for philosophy, Mr Kipling cakes and sadistic love affairs. This most recent addition to the Murdoch biographical canon purports to rescue the novelist and her work from the "decrepitude" of her final years.

Happily for the reader, AN Wilson's account of his 30-year relationship with Murdoch and John Bayley only succeeds in adding yet more spice to the "Oxford Stew" (as Elias Canetti cattily categorised Murdoch in his posthumous memoirs). Recent victors started to sound more like sax virtuosi than organ maestros, as they tootled and riffed through their informal, offbeat parables and monologues.Perhaps the prize needed that dose of cool. Any more such whimsical winners, though, and the curse of conceptualism could well have taken hold. In their engaging ways, both Yann Martel and DBC Pierre spun ingenious variations on a single routine, a gimmick, a shtick. A contest that formerly lauded the Lucian Freuds of fiction had veered towards the Tracey Emins. If this tilt had continued, the 2004 long-list boasted a perfect candidate for Turner-style Booker glory: Nicola Barker's Clear, her achingly hip and street-smart rapid-response novel provoked by David Blaine's 44-day fast-in-a-box beside Tower Bridge.But that trend - or rot? - has stopped. These judges have reined in fiction's high-gloss, high-concept one-trick ponies.

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