Fiction

‘I was what they call an “independent scholar”’, confides the narrator of Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill, a middle-aged writer from New York of modest reputation who secures a three-month residency at the prestigious Deuter Centre in Berlin. While there, he hopes to write something about ‘the construction of the self in lyric poetry’ and escape the pressures of fatherhood. However, he soon finds the ethos of the centre — on transparency, surveillance and measurable outputs — counterproductive to his notions of artistic creation. Instead, Kunzru’s protagonist is pulled away by new distractions. He discovers that the romantic writer Henrich von Kleist killed himself and a young woman in a suicide

‘That was how that part of the world was at the time. Every bit of it belonged to Europeans, at least on a map.’ That part of the world is East Africa, particularly what is now Tanzania, whose early-20th-century history is the backdrop to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives. The novel spans the years preceding and during the first world war, when East Africa was colonised by the Germans and British. The turbulent history of the region is relayed through the unanchored lives of three adolescents — Hamza, Ilyas and his sister Afiya. For various reasons, they find themselves uprooted and isolated from their families. Their life paths cross via Khalifa, a

Inside Story is called, on the front cover, which boasts a very charming photograph of the author and Christopher Hitchens, a novel. It also has a good and comprehensive (14-page) index. I’ve been a book reviewer for 35 years and I’ve lost count of the number of times I have wished, professionally, for larger novels to have an index; but I’m not sure I can remember seeing one before. A non-facetious one, that is. This index is very much non-facetious. Novel or not, then? I’ll try to get rid of this question as quickly as possible, but it has to be addressed (as I write these words, I have a

The line between obsession and addiction is as thin as rolling paper. Neither are simple and both stem from absence, avoidance or — as Jenny, the dissatisfied housewife in Natasha Randall’s droll debut novel, calls it — life’s ‘marshmallow numbness’. Jenny’s drug? The sticky, sweet-smelling orange glue that seals the intimate letters she receives from a prison inmate called John — ‘just a little lick’ and a liquid warmth surges within her, letting her breathe, making the ground feel solid. But she isn’t the only Tinkley family member with a secret. Which brings us to the question posed by the outwardly forward-thinking Father Brian: ‘What sort of family is this?’

Rose Tremain has followed her masterly The Gustav Sonata with an altogether different novel. In 1865, Clorinda Morrissey, a 38-year-old woman from Dublin, arrives in Bath and sells a ruby necklace in order to set up Mrs Morrissey’s High Class Tea Rooms. Mrs Morrissey believes that ‘the future was going to be perfumed with raspberry jam and freshly baked scones and fragrant lemon cake’. The tea rooms also, however, once open, become the scene of Jane Adeane — a highly skilled nurse — rejecting a proposal from Dr Valentine Ross, her colleague at her father’s surgery. Jane has achieved a near-mythic status as a nurse in Bath and ‘was described

Like Ottessa Moshfegh’s first novel Eileen (2015), Death in Her Hands plays with the conventions of noir. Vesta Gul, a recently widowed 72-year-old, lives in a secluded lake cabin in rural New England. Walking her dog one day in the woods, she finds a cryptic note under a rock: ‘Her name was Magda,’ it reads. ‘Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.’ With no trace of a body or other clues in sight, Vesta pockets the note. Is it a prank, she wonders? Or ‘the beginning of a story tossed out as a false start, a bad opening’? What follows is less

Presumably because a small part of it takes place in Salford, the epigraph to Andrew O’Hagan’s latest novel consists of four lines from Ewan MacColl’s ‘Dirty Old Town’. More fitting, though, might have been six words from the Undertones’ ‘Teenage Kicks’: ‘Teenage dreams, so hard to beat.’ The first half of the book follows a group of lads from Ayrshire as they excitedly prepare for, excitedly travel to and excitedly attend a post-punk music festival in Manchester in 1986. The narrator is the bookish 18-year-old Jimmy Collins, whose life bears a close resemblance to O’Hagan’s at the same age and time. But the focus is firmly on his friend Tully

Lissa Evans has been single-handedly rescuing the Hampstead novel from its reputation of being preoccupied by pretension and middle-class morality. Her original black comedy (Crooked Heart) concerned Vee, a middle-aged suburban scammer, and the prodigiously bright but orphaned Noel, who join forces in north London’s urban village during the second world war. Evans then went back in time to tell the story of Noel’s Suffragist godmother Mattie founding a disastrous girls’ club on Hampstead Heath during the 1930s (Old Baggage). In V for Victory, the story moves forward again. It’s 1944, and Hitler’s rockets are falling all over London. Mattie is dead. Vee is pretending to be Noel’s aunt and

This debut novel, which opens with ‘a high- school lacrosse party in 1999 and the rumour of a sexual assault,’ is billed as one story told in four different genres: memoir, horror, noir and thriller. It even has four covers. There is a reason for this, as Kate Reed Petty explains in an author’s note: In borrowing these forms from popular culture, I was looking for ways to push against the simplistic assumptions we too often make about power, abuse and gender — assumptions that lock us into the same stories, again and again and again. She raises certain questions. Who does a story about assault belong to? Whose version