Susie Mesure | The Spectator columnists & writers

Reassess every relationship you’ve ever had before it’s too late

‘Reading is a celebration of the mystery of ourselves,’ according to Elizabeth Strout, who writes to help readers understand themselves and other people. In Oh William!, Strout resurrects Lucy Barton, the enigmatic heroine of a previous novel, setting her on a mission to get to know William, her first husband. This is Strout’s third outing for Lucy, who also reappeared in Anything is Possible, a collection of interlinked stories about the residents of Amgash, Illinois, Lucy’s hometown. Now in her early sixties and newly widowed, Lucy is good friends with William, who is on wife number three — Estelle, a woman 22 years younger than him. ‘And that was no easy thing,’ Lucy, a successful novelist, writes. Strout fans will know William from My Name is Lucy Barton, the 2016 novel that became a one-woman play, starring Laura Linney, which Lucy narrates from her Manhattan hospital bed after a ruptured appendix leaves her mysteriously ill for weeks.

A race against time: A Calling for Charlie Barnes, by Joshua Ferris, reviewed

What is life if not a quest to find one’s calling while massaging the narrative along the way? This question propels the eponymous protagonist, still struggling to wring meaning from his existence even as it crashes to an end, in A Calling for Charlie Barnes, the fourth novel from Joshua Ferris. ‘It preoccupied him: everyone had a calling. It depressed him: he had not found his. It gave him hope: he might still do so before he died,’ writes the story’s narrator, Jake Barnes, about his father, whose life clock is ticking with a cancer diagnosis. ‘The big kahuna of cancers: pancreatic.’ In contrast to his father, Jake has found his calling as a writer, much to the mystification of Charlie, who thinks writing novels a ‘very silly occupation’.

The roots of conflict: The Island of Missing Trees, by Elif Shafak, reviewed

The Island of Missing Trees feels like a strange title until you realise how hard Elif Shafak makes trees work in her latest novel, an epic tale about love, grief and memory set in Cyprus and London between 1974 and the ‘late 2010s’. One tree, a fig or ficus carica, narrates half the story, tipping Shafak’s 12th novel into myth territory. The others — the missing trees — are stand-ins for those killed in the 1974 Cypriot civil war, metaphors labouring as hard as plants for the British-Turkish author who fled Turkey after being prosecuted for ‘insulting Turkishness’ in her 2006 novel The Bastard of Istanbul. The action opens in December, in a school in north London, where 16-year-old Ada (whose Turkish-Cypriot mother, Defne, died the previous January) is in a history lesson.

Studies in vulnerability: A Shock, by Keith Ridgway, reviewed

Keith Ridgway’s seventh book is a sultry, steamy shock of a novel, not least because nine years ago, despite the critical success of Hawthorn & Child, he retired from writing, telling his publishers he was done with making up stories. He also stopped reading — although only for a year, lured back by the likes of Muriel Spark and Georges Simenon’s Maigret series. Reading made him want to write again. The result is A Shock, a provocative collection of nine interlinked stories, jostled together like neighbours on a London street or regulars in a pub, which is where most of his characters cross paths. The composite form, popular with the likes of Polly Samson, Jennifer Egan and David Szalay, creates something stronger than its parts.

A study in vulnerability: The Coming Bad Days, by Sarah Bernstein, reviewed

When the unnamed narrator of Sarah Bernstein’s The Coming Bad Days leaves the man with whom she has been living because she can’t bear the sight of the tidy line of his shirt collars hanging in the wardrobe, she triggers an existential crisis that dominates this debut novel: ‘The notion that I was free in theory but also in practice to do whatever I liked with my life was terrifying: it was nothing short of a nightmare.’ She moves to a cottage, where she lives alone, worrying variously about the plight of women and the state of a world that is on fire or under water depending on the season. She contemplates suicide, but is too cowardly for this ‘pitiful act of self-assertion’, and instead lands a job at a university, where she chooses to research Paul Celan, a postwar German-language poet who took his own life.

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