Gillian Slovo's last novel, 2004's Ice Road, was nominated for the Orange Prize. Her new one, Black Orchids, wasn't. In many ways, I'm not surprised. Slovo's tale of expatriates swapping Ceylon in the late 1940s for a snobbish England is possibly too readable for a literary prize. In some ways, it is a colonial take on the Mr Darcy-Elizabeth Bennet marriage in Pride and Prejudice: Slovo even quotes Elizabeth's awe at seeing Pemberly at one point. Here, our heroine is the winsome but directionless Evelyn (all blonde hair and fair skin) and our hero Emil, the handsome son of a rich Sinhalese family. When Emil's muscles 'contract' twice in the space of only four paragraphs, love is inevitable. One son later and the couple move to a dismal England. It is the 1950s, after all. Slovo's prose is easy on the eye but this is also arguably its greatest weakness. Entire pages drift by during which one is told much but little happens. Slovo's dialogue is similarly hamstrung, seeming to have been drawn from am-dram productions of Noel Coward. The English tend to be beastly, snobbish and ghastly; the rest rather less so. It is all dreadfully patronising and terribly, terribly disappointing.