A choice of first novels | 4 February 2012

Mountains of the Moon is narrated by a woman just released after spending ten years in jail. The reason for her sentence and the details of her previous life are pieced together through disjointed fragments, forming a complex jigsaw. Lulu had a shocking childhood, with a violent stepfather and negligent mother. Her only loving relatives were her grandfather, who fuelled her imagination by conjuring up the Masai Mara in her dreary south-England surroundings, and her two half brothers, from whom she was eventually separated.

This account, related in an idiosyncratic patois, with the matter-of-fact innocence of an abused child for whom abnormality is the norm, is quite horrifying. Lulu is also heartbreakingly charming and vulnerable in her observations: ‘Nanny comes like a weeble down the path’; ‘the policemen look like wombles, they both got the dog’s hair on’. Her narrative voice as an adult is equally arresting. The details are so vivid that one cannot help feeling the author (clealy writing under a pseudonym) must have had first-hand experience of this world of detention centres and foster care. Mountains of the Moon is a riveting novel, both disturbing and entertaining, with twisted low-life characters rivalling any created by Martin Amis or Nicola Barker.

Moving from abuse to subtler forms of manipulation, Harriet Lane’s Alys, Always is a superbly disquieting psychological thriller. Frances is an invisible literary subeditor, until she happens on an accident involving the affluent Alys. She is set to forget the episode until she senses its possibilities.

Lane is a formidable wordsmith, and the literary world is conjured up in all its delicious, gossipy hierarchy. She specialises in sharp character assassinations: the imperious literary editor who ignores the lowly, but ‘unctuously attends to the ego’ of the important; the titled daughter of a famous writer who ‘is entirely at ease talking about herself, as if it’s her birthright to be heard’.