The L-Shaped Room (novel) The L-Shaped Room (novel) The L-Shaped Room is a 1960 British novel by Lynne Reid Banks which tells the story of a young woman, unmarried and pregnant, who moves into a London boarding house, befriending a young man in the building. It was adapted into a film by Bryan Forbes with significant differences from the novel. "The L-Shaped Room" is set in the late 1950s and follows a young woman, Jane Graham, who arrives alone at a run-down boarding house in London after being turned out of her comfortable middle class home by her shocked father after telling him she
Debut novel writers without established legacies. In the same piece for the "Times," Ayana Mathis describes the debut novel as a "a piece of the writer’s soul in a way that subsequent books can’t ever be", because the novel is necessarily a work of passion and a product of all of their life before that moment. Often an author's first novel will not be as complex stylistically or thematically as subsequent works and often will not feature the author's typical literary characteristics. "Huffington Post"'s Dave Astor attributes these to two forces: first that authors are still learning their own unique style and