Sayari Debnath

“He’d filled the cups to the brim, and a client had ended up with hot coffee all over his shirt. Higashinakano had been forbidden to serve the coffee ever again. How lucky for him, I thought.

“It is the story of a number of things – of the gap between the man’s musical ability and his ability to fit it to his own life; of the difference between the demands of expression and the demands of life here below; and finally of the difference between good and bad in a native American art form – jazz music.” Dorothy Baker started her novelist career writing about what she liked best – jazz. Published in 1938, Young Man with a Horn is based on the music of the cornet player, Bix Beiderbecke.

“I suddenly saw Great Granny Webster as awesome. She had outlived so many. She had managed to be both the start of a line and the end of a line. In my family she seemed to be Alpha and Omega.” Caroline Blackwood’s 1977 novel, Great Granny Webster, shortlisted for the same year’s Man Booker Prize, was famously denied the winner status by the jury chair, poet and novelist Philip Larkin, for being an “autobiography and not fiction”.