Emily Rhodes

First novels: When romance develops from an old photograph

Helene Gestern's People in the Photo deserves all its accolades; Ghost Moth and Land Where I Flee are good, too

[Getty Images/iStockphoto]

The intensely lyrical Ghost Moth is set in Belfast in 1969, as the Troubles begin and when Katherine, housewife and mother of four, finds herself remembering an old love affair. Michèle Forbes achieves a vivid depiction of family life — the daily squabbles and teasing, the nuances of Katherine’s love for her children through a haze of exhaustion, one daughter’s struggle to be liked by bullying friends and another’s blushingly awkward first crush. Interwoven with these domestic scenes are chapters set 20 years earlier, in which we see the unfurling of Katherine’s haunting romance.

The novel is in part a meditation on differing forms of love, comparing this all-consuming passion, cut unhappily short, to Katherine’s ‘love lived, not imagined’ for her husband, with its ‘sweet pattern of compromise’. Alongside are the startling changes happening in the city: what was an optimistic place with a close-knit community and amateur dramatics is fast becoming a battleground. People used to address each other as ‘Miss’ but now they are ‘fuckin’ Taigs’; a romantic stroll is likely to end with being egged or spat at, and the once moonlit night sky is ablaze with the flare of arson. The ‘ghost moth’ of the title flutters through the novel, alighting on various pages. As Katherine explains to her daughter, ‘Some people believed that ghost moths were the souls of the dead waiting to be caught.’ In this affecting portrait of lost love and a lost city, Forbes catches those souls beautifully.

In The Land Where I Flee, Prajwal Parajuly follows four Nepali-Indian siblings as they return from their adopted homes in America and England to the Himalayan hilltown of their childhood. They have come to celebrate their grandmother’s birthday, which transpires to be a perfect occasion for the playing out of complicated family dynamics.

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