When she was chair of the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2010, Daisy Goodwin wrote a controversial essay lamenting the ‘unrelenting grimness’ of so many novels and pointing out that ‘generally great fiction contains light and shade’—not only misery but joy and humor. ‘It is time for publishers to stop treating literary fiction as the novelistic equivalent of cod-liver oil: if it’s nasty it must be good for you.

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