The L-Shaped Room Academy Award for Best Actress. A 27-year-old French woman, Jane Fosset (Caron), arrives alone at a run down boarding house in Notting Hill, London, moving into an L-shaped room. Beautiful but withdrawn, she encounters the residents of her house, each a social outsider in his or her own way, including a gay black guitar player. Jane is pregnant and has no desire to marry the father. On her first visit to a doctor, she wants to find out if she really is pregnant and consider her options. The doctor's facile assumption that she must want either marriage or an abortion
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