Literary Review - Britain's best loved literary magazine

The Age of Magic prevailed over competition from a very strong shortlist, including the winner of this year's Booker Prize, Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North ('Hands found flesh; flesh, flesh. He felt the improbable weight of her eyelash with his own; he kissed the slight, rose-coloured trench that remained from her knicker elastic, running around her belly like the equator line circling the world'); Haruki Murakami's Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage ('Shiro's were small, but her nipples were as hard as tiny round pebbles. Their pubic hair was as wet as a rain forest. Their breath mingled with his, becoming one, like currents from far away, secretly overlapping at the dark bottom of the sea'); and Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Cunningham's The Snow Queen ('He hears himself gasp in wonder. He falls into an ecstatic burning harmedness, losing, lost, unmade. And is finished').