Fiction

This blistering debut novel from the acclaimed short-story writer Wendy Erskine circles around a case of sexual assault, expanding into a polyphonic story that is at once an evocative fictional oral history of contemporary Belfast, a powerful depiction of trauma and a provocative exploration of social power dynamics. Erskine teases out narrative strands through a handful of characters’ viewpoints and intersperses these with vignettes written in a first-person verbatim style from a wider cast. She has carefully selected her main parts. Alongside Misty, the assaulted teenager, the focus is on the three women whose 18-year-old sons were the perpetrators. There is Frankie, who has left a childhood in care, thanks

It’s 1796, and an idealistic young English doctor, Duval Harlington, just released from La Force prison in revolutionary Paris, learns that his father is dead. He is now Lord Harlington, heir to a fortune and the idyllic estate of Muchmore. But in order to gain possession of his heritage – and, as importantly, foil the aspirations of his unpleasant cousin Ralph Carson – Duval must marry within two days and seven hours. No suitable partner is available, so he buys a woman in a Norfolk wife sale for ten guineas. Money, its acquisition and loss, is woven through this hugely enjoyable novel. The French refugees trying to make their way

Old Kiln is a novel spoken by the muse of memory but carved into shape by the fear of forgetting. Jia Pingwa (b.1952) wrote the first draft in 2009 after visiting his home village. Remembering a prolonged bloody conflict that tore the village apart during the Cultural Revolution, he was disturbed to find all traces of it gone – and the younger generation knowing nothing about either the violence or the Cultural Revolution itself. Old Kiln also confronts a similar amnesia afflicting the entire country. The fictionalised village is China writ small – its kiln that fires porcelain providing the book’s title.  Jia is superb at marshalling large-scale scenes of

As bombs rain down on Nazi-occupied Prague, Georg Wilhelm Pabst shoots a film – a romantic courtroom drama adapted from a pulp novel by a creepy Third Reich hack, Alfred Karrasch. Although the leading man finds it strange to make any movie ‘in the middle of the apocalypse’, his director insists that ‘art is always out of place’. In retrospect, Pabst assures the star, it will look like ‘the only thing that mattered’. The discoverer of Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks, and the director of The Joyless Street, Lulu, Westfront 1918 and other prewar masterpieces, Pabst really did attempt to film The Molander Case in Prague in 1944-45. The bizarre,

Some people spend years squirming on a leather chaise longue before they come to understand, as Philip Larkin so pithily observed: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’ Few go on to make peace with the sagacity delivered in his next line: ‘They may not mean to, but they do.’ In My Sister and Other Lovers, Esther Freud’s sequel to her autobiographical novel Hideous Kinky, sisters Lucy and Bea – who spent their early childhood trailing after their hippy mother through 1960s Morocco – slowly edge towards such catharsis. Before that, however, comes a lot more turbulence, and Freud – whose great-grandfather pioneered the couch method – is acutely

The sea, as you might expect, looms large in Benjamin Wood’s finely tuned novella Seascraper. Thomas Flett – one of the most touching protagonists I’ve encountered in recent years – is barely out of his teens, but he’s already battered by toil. His days are spent shanking – gathering shrimps on the beach – with only a horse and cart for company. The setting, gorgeously evoked, is Longferry, a grim coastal town in 1950s Britain. Tom himself appears as if he’s been transplanted from the 19th century. The sea, though, brings change, when hidebound past comes crashing against thrusting future. Tom has a stifling oedipal relationship with his mother, who

The Boys, the entertaining debut novel by the literary critic Leo Robson, is set in Swiss Cottage during the 2012 London Olympics. Johnny Voghel is ‘methodically lying about’, home on leave from an admin job in the West Midlands and grieving both for his mother, who died the previous year, and – by extension – his father, who died when he was a child. A typical day is spent ‘smoking badly rolled cigarettes, watching the ring-fenced patches of grass suffer in the heat, nodding at passers-by, tweezing grey hairs from my nostrils and popping the spots on my chin’, before walking into the centre to gaze at the BT Tower

‘Summer was the season of strangeness,’ muses Temperance, the barmaid at Little Nettlebed’s only alehouse. ‘People behaved peculiarly then.’ Temperance’s aside anchors the dramatic irony at the heart of Xenobe Purvis’s debut novel The Hounding, set in an 18th-century Oxfordshire village in the grip of a drought. In the villagers’ eyes, through which much of the story is told, this strangeness starts with the Mansfield sisters, five orphaned girls leading a reclusive life on a farm across the river, in the sole care of their blind grandfather, John. The girls’ free manners, in flippant disregard of the era’s orthodoxies, fill onlookers with mistrust. To us, however, the sisters are simply

Two shibboleths are treated in Thomas Peermohamed Lambert’s audacious debut novel. The first is the University of Oxford; the second is the Israeli-Palestinian controversy. ‘It is the great issue, isn’t it? The great shibboleth.’ Edward, the protagonist, is a state-educated undergraduate whose connection to Islam is a Muslim grandfather from Zanzibar. He finds himself in a world of wealthy public school boys with ‘a social calendar, rugby fixtures and sexual assault hearings’, and girls from sister schools, ‘fully recovered from eating disorders’. This fictitious world is outdated, but Lambert’s satirical touch still hits the mark about ‘the creatures of the written word [the university] specialised in churning out, as if

‘Everyone has a mother, but we don’t all smash up our lives for her sake,’ we hear in the first few pages of Lili is Crying. It’s a sensible message, but one which seems suited to an entirely different book. Hélène Bessette’s 1953 debut novel – translated into English for the first time – is a tale of bust-ups, mistakes and life-ruining decisions in a fiery, fickle relationship between a mother and daughter. Charlotte and her daughter Lili live in Provence, and the novel jumps between the 1930s and 1940s, from Lili’s ‘ribbons and Sunday dresses’ to her first freighted dalliances with boys. Charlotte runs a boarding house from which