To let the world know that such things go on? To show how completely vulnerable children are to their parents' desire to damage them? To make a point about hope - that some kind of sanity can be salvaged from even the most vile beginnings? The book certainly forces one to consider these questions, all of which seem valid and worthy and yet somehow the relentless scale of the tragedy and the explicit details of the sexual suffering are too much. I wondered, while reading, what exactly the point of committing all this horror to paper was. We are not spared any details when Sapphire describes Precious's father having brutal and depraved sex with his daughter. We are given a glimpse of her state of shame and confusion after these regular assaults when we are told that smearing her face with her own faeces after her father has raped her is somehow soothing to the heroine's troubled mind. Trying to write helps her find a way of acknowledging what she has suffered.

Learning to read her class-mates' work as well as books like The Colour Purple help her to manage her shame. The book's movement towards hope is slow and difficult, never facile, and does not underestimate the obstacles involved. Reading this book made me distinctly uncomfortable, for many different reasons, and it is obviously meant to. Here, in a small class of rape and incest survivors, ex-crack addicts, a girl who has had to watch her mother being murdered and a junior prostitute, Precious begins the long and difficult journey towards recovery. Raped by her father from infancy, she gives birth to his child at 12, on the kitchen floor, following a severe beating from her mother who has also subjected her to sexual and physical assaults. The result is a mongoloid baby whom she refers to throughout the book as Little Mongo.

At 16, Precious is pregnant by her father again and, as the baby starts to show inside her, is expelled from school, and sent to an alternative centre for children with difficulties, called Each One Teach One. It tells the tale of Precious Jones, a 16-year-old black girl who has never been out of Harlem, who has suffered the worst kind of childhood abuses you could imagine. Not exactly Operation Gomorrah or anything.Readable enough in its second half, once the action belatedly starts, the novel nevertheless contains a quantity of snide remarks about book reviewers, invariably a sign that the author is conscious of failure and expects bad notices May Drabble soon return to form.. It's unusual for a book to make me cry, or, for that matter, to make me vomit.

Push, a novel by an American writer called Sapphire, produced both reactions. Indeed, for the overkill...There will be one or two deaths, but not many." So, not an overkill at all, then. The English are clumsy and gross and at the same time runtish They do not make the best of themselves. Their bodies are thick, their faces are either pinched and beaky like mean birds or shapeless as potatoes." Is Drabble speaking for herself here? She doesn't seem to be speaking for David Niven, Cary Grant, Vivien Leigh or Julie Christie. And "pure- bred English" is a stupidly racist contradiction in terms.Nearing the end, the narrator says, "We are nearing the end Soon we can go for the kill. The pure-bred English are a motley, mottled, mongrel ugly breed, blotched with all the wrong pigments, with hair that does not do much for them at all. You see it coming the instant Drabble introduces him, but that doesn't make it any easier to bear.Will Paine, a character intended to be catalytic but really just peripheral, is half-Jamaican and, we are told, "too nice-looking to be pure-bred English.