Pedigree chums
On Friendship Andrew O’Hagan (Faber, £12.99)
SCANNING On Friendship’s scant 137 pages in search of a sentence or two that might convey something of the book’s tone, your reviewer found them in the opening paragraph of Chapter 4: “I first met Edna O’Brien on a mild spring evening in 2009. I had just stepped out of my publisher’s offices onto Great Russell Street in Bloomsbury. There had been a party to celebrate the seventieth birthday of Seamus Heaney and I was leaving early to get to the National Theatre.”