In Slaughterhouse Heart, by contrast, Afsaneh Knight handles a shifting narrative with dexterity; crucially, the changing angles also offer the reader a new perspective on the main story and do not simply represent a means of extending the plot to novel-length. James, a former boxer, suffered injuries in his career which brought on a degenerative mental condition that caused him to be both savage and somewhat weird towards his young son, Jamie. Years later he is dying in a hospice, and Jamie, now a successful actor with an immense store of anger and neurosis, flies reluctantly to his bedside.

The novel tells Jamie’s and, in less revealing detail, James’s stories, and draws in other narratives, including those of an 11th-century saint who is overseeing the patients in the hospice, and Meryl, a relentlessly cheerful volunteer-visitor whose crotchetiness to her husband is redolent of Dickens’s Mrs Jellyby, the egotistical philanthropist who ignores her own family. Together these strands look at the way we exercise our sense of responsibility towards others; Knight is astute at showing how our kind actions are often guided by a desire to feel and look benevolent rather than by a particular desire to be good. Slaughterhouse Heart is a deft and promising first novel.

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