Credits
A. L. Kennedy's Paradise antiheroine Hannah could be a Scottish Augusten Burroughs. Like that best-selling author in Dry, Hannah is a bitingly keen, booze-soaked observer: A bar patron is ''a mouse-brown woman with wilting clothes,'' fellow rehab patients are ''emotional vampires,'' and her hometown is ''the gossipy, swollen village that calls itself a city, the greasy, grey-faced hole where no one can ever be truly unobserved.'' Because she's so cynical, Hannah's moments of tenderness with her concerned, aging parents or her flawed yet sweet boyfriend are heart-breaking in their stripped-bare yearning. Paradise can grow tedious as it careers between drunken tirade and cranky sobriety, but ultimately it achieves a swirling waking-dream state that's both jarring and richly satisfying.





