I'm beginning to warm to the Writer's Retreat. Today it seems friendly and intimate, a great venue to hear Rana Dasgupta and Suhayl Saadi present their second novels.

Saadi reads from Joseph's Box. We hear the metaphorical account of his protagonist, Zuleka, wandering around an abandoned Sicilian house, grieving for her mother and young son who are buried in Cathcart Cemetery. The passage is an intense sensory journey of both the architecture and the character's raw misery. Saadi is a fervent reader, who manages to convey great emotion while avoiding cliché or sentiment.

Dasgupta, reading from Solo, guides us around the bleak, crumbling flat of his protagonist, an elderly, impoverished man. He conveys the character's loneliness with grim urban illustrations of the wall by the train where everyone instinctively urinates on the way home from the pub, and the intellectual poverty of the television. Dasgupta's prose is full of echo and reflection, which he reads with a good sense of pace.

Both authors present a geographically ambitious second novel, and a character who is dislocated from their landscape in some way, either by grief or by social exclusion. Both regard their work as realist fiction, though Saadi tells us that with this project he sought to juxtapose the notion of the realist novel with sensate writing and inclusion of the metaphysical. He tells us that he writes from the centre out, with loose ideas of waystations which build in detail.

After the event, I find myself in the Speigelbar having a glass of wine with a corporate researcher who tells me that he really doesn't understand literature at all. So I tell him about metaphor and realism, and he tells me about the marketing genius of the bookshop.