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Two great ‘state of the nation’ summer reads
SOLOMON HUGHES recommends two novels that offer a social panorama on the way we live now

I’M ALWAYS on the lookout for what get called “State of the Nation” novels, so was pleased to have come across two of them in the wild recently.
A full-on State of the Nation novel is the kind of social panorama that takes in many levels of society and shows up social issues, a fiction that exposes social exploitation, like Dickens, or describes “The Way We Live Now,” like Trollope’s satire on corruption in Victorian Britain.
A lot of fiction has a very narrow focus on the personal lives of the comfortably off, so fiction doesn’t really have to be a “panorama” to get called “State of the Nation” — it can just present some view of people who worry about how to pay the bills as well as how to live their emotional lives.
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