Vulnerable, perspicacious, funny, literate, Rosa is an unforgettable narrator, stumbling around on borrowed heels, musing on Heraclitean notions of flux. Her tone lies somewhere between those of Bridget Jones and Philip Larkin. Kavenna writes with great elegance and has a delicious grasp of comic bathos; although she occasionally over- indulges her heroine’s self-absorption, the quality of the prose never dips.
Children of the Revolution by Dinaw Mengestu (Jonathan Cape, £12.99, pp. 228), is about Sepha Stephanos, an Ethiopian immigrant in America. Having fled the country of his birth at the age of 16, when his father was fatally beaten in front of him by revolutionary militia, he now owns a dilapidated general store in a scrawny neighbourhood in Washington DC. He spends most evenings there, with his friends Joseph and Kenneth, both Africans themselves, drinking whisky and playing a nebulous game that involves detailing various African dictatorships. It is a game that has sustained them over the years.
When Judith, a white woman, and her mixed-race daughter Naomi, renovate one of the grander houses in the neighbourhood, Sepha strikes up a friendship with them. But the locals see her as a symbol of unwanted gentrification, and her stay there seems doomed; Sepha, meanwhile, struggles to hold on to the tenuous romantic link between them whilst configuring his own sense of belonging.
The narration constantly switches timeframes, forcing us to share Sepha’s sense of displacement. The novel is illuminated by our protagonist’s memories of Ethiopia — the death of his father is a particularly powerful moment in the book — and several wry vignettes involving Joseph and Kenneth in which the ambivalence of each man’s feelings about their African homelands is revealed. Sepha’s listlessness — he is a man ‘stuck between two worlds’ — and the general air of mournful circumspection do, at times, sabotage the narrative’s dramatic impetus, but otherwise this is an impressive, moving debut.
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