Jeffrey Archer died last night at 86. He sold more than 300 million books, and he never once pretended to be anything other than what he was: a man who wanted you to turn the page. That sounds like a small ambition. It isn’t. Plenty of literary novelists have spent careers trying to hold a reader the way Archer held millions of them on trains, on beaches, in hospital waiting rooms.

Douglas Stuart won the Booker Prize for Shuggie Bain, which was a novel about poverty, addiction, and the particular cruelty of the Scottish working class toward those it identifies as different. Young Mungo covered similar territory with similar emotional intensity. Both books were exceptional. Both were also so concentrated on their setting and social milieu that readers who loved them had to wonder what Stuart would do when he moved the frame.