Jessica Anthony: Orbiting the brink
Set over the course of a sunny November day in suburban Delaware in the late 1950s, Jessica Anthony’s The Most dissects the hopes, uncertainties and secret desires of a married couple whose life hasn’t quite panned out as they’d hoped. Handsome people-pleaser Virgil Beckett drifted into a job as an insurance agent, but is ill-equipped...
Vial
I was loading the dishwasher when the clinic rang.‘I don’t know how to say this,’ she said, which seemed a strange opening sentence for a medical professional,‘… but did you use a sperm donor three years ago? Vial 2360?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. I didn’t particularly like thinking about the donor. It wasn’t something I thought...
Here or there
Dan proposed to me the evening of his mother’s funeral. After saying goodbye to the last of our friends at the end of the wake, he grabbed a half-consumed bottle of wine and led me to the back of his parents’ yard, down by the compost bin and dying vegetable garden, where we squatted beside...
from A Change in the Air
In Jane Clarke’s third poetry collection A Change in the Air, voices of the past and present reverberate with courage and resilience in the face of poverty, prejudice, war and exile and the everyday losses of living. Across six sequences, these intimate poems accrue power and resonance in what is essentially a book of love...
Precious weirdness
Claire Vaye Watkins’ I Love You, But I’ve Chosen Darkness, is an immersive, transgressive and darkly funny work of autofiction. Its narrator, a writer named Claire Vaye Watkins, leaves her husband and newborn baby daughter to go on a book tour, which transforms into a wild romp away from the confines of marriage and motherhood,...
Love in Ramallah
Unlike most other Palestinian cities, Ramallah is a relatively new town, a de facto capital of the West Bank allowed to thrive after the Oslo Peace Accords, but just as quickly hemmed in and suffocated by the Occupation as the Accords have failed. Perched along the top of a mountainous ridge, it plays host to many contradictions:...
Starting over
Kololo Hill by Neema Shah (Picador, 18 February) starts with Idi Amin’s declaration that all Asians must leave Uganda within 90 days. What follows is one family’s fear, sadness and the uprooting of their whole life. Jaya and Motiband moved to Uganda from India and have built up a successful life and business along with...
Escape
Teresa was, on the whole, a serious, earnest woman, with a slightly uneasy smile that barely lifted the corners of her mouth. Her black eyes always seemed to be trying to wrest a secret from the person they observed. She had a thick mane of hair with a streak of grey on the right temple....
Ukamaka Olisakwe: Breaking free
Ukamaka Olisakwe’s fierce, measured, ultimately hopeful novel Ogadinma, rightly dubbed “a feminist classic in the making”, is an unflinching portrait of female survival and inner strength in the face of multiple harrowing obstacles in modern-day Nigeria, where patriarchal rules and behaviours are ingrained but fought against daily by the nation’s women. The eponymous heroine is...
Megan Hunter: The shadow side
Megan Hunter’s second novel The Harpy is a dark and dazzling tale of pent-up rage and revenge festering beneath a veneer of everyday domesticity. Mother-of-two Lucy Stevenson’s life is upended by a phone call from a man who informs her his wife is having an affair with her husband Jake. They agree to stay together...
The existentialist and the minestrone
Kit’s mobile rings at exactly 2.00 pm. ‘Why is everyone booking a time to ring?’ ‘It gives a structure to the day,’ says Sarah. ‘The day mightn’t want structure.’ A robin crashes against the bay window in Kit’s first-floor living room. ‘Ouch,’ she says. ‘What?’ ‘It’s the robin who flies into my window. I try to...
How Boris Johnson ruined my book launch (and Vladimir Nabokov restored it)
There’s a persistent aftertaste to bad timing. Just ask someone born on 11 September 2001, or the brides and grooms of late November 1963, after JFK’s visit to Dallas. Better yet, consider Vladimir Nabokov, whose novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – not nearly as famous as Lolita but arguably on par with it...
