DJ Taylor writing in Tuesday's Guardian...

"The presence on the longlist of at least four novelists who seemed consciously to be setting their books in the great open spaces beyond the M25 confirmed a tendency that has been going on in British fiction for at least a dozen years: the utter exhaustion of the metropolitan novel, whether set in the Hampstead drawing room or beneath the thump and judder of the Westway, and the flight back to the regions. There is an economic reason for this retreat, in that most novelists can no longer afford to live in London (historically the English writer's natural home) but the kind of books that Birch, Darling and Murray write suggest that there is also an aesthetic explanation - that the best stories are lurking out there in the provinces, beyond the grasp of London medialand."