The children’s hour: first novels brim with close family observations

Kiley Reid’s Philadelphia-set debut, Such a Fun Age (Bloomsbury, £12.99), is a satire on white saviour syndrome, woke culture and virtue-signalling motherhood. That it manages this balancing act with such political finesse and humour is testament to the powers of its author, who, like her heroine Emira, the 25-year-old black baby-sitter, spent time nannying for white families.

When Emira’s boss Alix calls her at a party and asks for some emergency childcare (after Alix’s home is egged, as a result of a racist gaffe made by her TV anchor husband), Emira drops everything. Short of money, about to lose her health insurance, she takes Alix’s daughter Briar to a ‘super-white’ store, where she’s accused of kidnapping the child. This dismal piece of racial profiling drives the novel.

Filming the supermarket incident on his phone is Kelley, the improbably lofty, white love interest: ‘His tallness was still shocking and his hands seemed almost freakishly huge.’ He tries to persuade Emira to quit working for Alix — who longs to tell her employee that ‘one of her closest friends was also black’ and that ‘she had read everything that Toni Morrison had ever written’. But a secret past connection between Alix and Kelley derails this plan, forcing Emira to make a series of daunting moral choices pivoting on class, race and her own helpless affection for Briar. Written in fluent, Franzenian prose, Such a Fun Age is one of the funniest and most incisive recent novels about modern America.

Love and Other Thought Experiments by the actor Sophie Ward (Corsair, £14.99) is a sophisticated conundrum. Each of its nine sections explores a different dilemma — from Pascal’s wager to Heraclitus’s river — around which the story of a couple, Rachel and Eliza, is woven.