Fiction

The Woman From Uruguay by Pedro Mairal

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The Woman From Uruguay

A Raging Midlife Crisis

Argentinian author and stay-at-home dad Lucas Pereyra has found a clever way to import, tax-free, the advance for his next book. Both Lucas’ flat and his marriage have seen better days and smuggling in the advance from Uruguay will leave him with some sorely needed cash and, hopefully, some forgiveness from his hard-working wife. There’s also an ulterior motive for going. Lucas has long fantasised about hooking up with the 28-year-old, beautiful woman he flirted with at a literary festival last time he visited. The Woman From Uruguay by Pedro Mairal is an intense and often comical account of what happens when hormones and the desire to escape from it all take over.

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A Girl In Winter by Philip Larkin

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A Girl in Winter

A quiet, sad, and often beautiful read

Set in wintry wartime England, A Girl in Winter by Philip Larkin is a reflective tale of lost innocence and disappointment. The titular girl is twenty-something librarian, Katherine Lind, a refugee living in an unnamed provincial town, where the harsh winter is threatening to become a state of mind. Memories of her first visit to England, a girlhood interlude with her penpal, Robin Fennel, contrast bitterly with her current lonely situation, but when fate causes Robin to resurface, memory and expectation play their usual sly tricks.

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The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante

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The Lying Life of Adults

A rude awakening

There comes a time in life, usually around puberty, when you wake up to the fact that your parents are not the infallible heroes you thought they were. Moreover, as Giovanna in The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante discovers, they lie. White little lies to cheer you up and, sometimes, dark, destructive lies that can ruin marriages and lives. Ferrante’s latest book, like her best-selling Neapolitan quartet, is also set in Naples, but this time in a middle-class academic home. The deceptions, passions and betrayals are the same, however, as is Ferrante’s extraordinary ability to inhabit the mind of someone else. My favourite Ferrante book remains The Days of Abandonment, but die-hard Ferrante fans will still want to read this book which has just come out as a film on Netflix.

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Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes

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Stone Blind

Hugely enjoyable visit to the fickle world of the Greek Gods

An amusing journey into the world of Greek gods and semi-gods has been the highlight of my holiday reading this Christmas. Stone Blind by Natalie Hayes is frivolous fun and a welcome distraction from family gatherings and dishwasher emptying. Hayes, a respected classicist whose mission it is to make Greek myths accessible and entertaining, takes a closer look at the infamous snake-headed Medusa and her lethal stare. Was she really as bad as her reputation? Why did her stare turn people into stone? And how did she end up with snakes as hair anyway?

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Little Boxes by Cecilia Knapp

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Little Boxes

No ordinary life

Capturing the blend of magic and melancholy curiously specific to English seaside towns, Little Boxes by Cecilia Knapp takes us to a Brighton the local tourist board never reveals. During the course of a stifling and turbulent summer, we follow four twenty-something friends as their lives buckle after the death of an elderly man, beloved to them all. An evocation of council estate life in all its colours and ‘ordinary’ young people on the cusp of great change, this debut novel of secrets and survival is an engrossing read.

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Mrs Caliban by Rachel Ingalls

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Mrs Caliban

A brilliantly subversive quest for liberation

Pottering about in her nicely linoleumed kitchen one day, Dorothy Caliban is startled to be confronted by a green sea-monster named Larry. Half-man, half-frog, he is an escapee from a nearby research institute, on the run and wanted for murder. He is also curiously attractive, and a welcome diversion for the sad and fragile housewife. Billed as an amphibious cult classic, Mrs Caliban by Rachel Ingalls is a clever and captivating read. Seemingly the decidedly uncommon tale of an inter-species love affair, but actually a delicious skewering of the American patriarchy.

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This Blinding Absence of Light by Tahar Ben Jelloun

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This Blinding Absence of Light

A remarkable, deeply unsettling novel

This Blinding Absence of Light by Tahar Ben Jelloun is a remarkable, deeply unsettling novel, based on a true story, which has reminded me of the incredible strength humans find in order to survive the darkest of situations. The author Tahar Ben Jelloun traces the experiences of political prisoner Salim, who in 1971 took part in a failed coup to oust King Hassan ll of Morocco. With sixty others, at the whim of the king, Salim was incarcerated in a secret prison complex deep in the Moroccan desert. He was to remain in this hellhole, known as Tazmamart, for nearly twenty years.

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Life for Sale by Yukio Mishima

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Life for Sale

Darkly comic Japanese noir

The artist Marina Abramovic’s endorsement of Life for Sale by Yukio Mishima piqued my curiosity and, sure enough, this book really is something else. A fast-moving, surreal noir novel originally published in 1968, Life for Sale is about a man who offers his life up for sale. What he expects to be a carefree, albeit lethal, experiment, turns out to be a whole lot more complicated involving gangsters, vampires, hallucinogenic beetle powder and poisoned carrots. Darkly comic and totally twisted, this book will appeal to all fans of surreal fiction and Japanese literature.

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The Folded Leaf by William Maxwell

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The Folded Leaf

A unique evocation of young male friendship

Revisiting novels can be a tortuous affair, sometimes bringing the painful realisation that we’ve outgrown favourite books and writers. Happily for me, The Folded Leaf by William Maxwell has provoked the opposite response. Maxwell’s nuanced and tender tale of male friendship remains a quiet triumph. Set in 1920’s Illinois, it charts the adolescence of pals Lymie Peters and Spud Latham, whose alliance hinges on Spud providing protection and social acceptance in exchange for Lymie’s devotion. In an era before male platonic love was considered questionable, their intense bond is fatally tested instead by misunderstandings, boyhood trauma, and the scarring silence of things left unsaid.

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I Fear My Pain Interests You by Stephanie LaCava

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I Fear My Pain Interests You

A stylish but detached tale of benumbed modern life

There’s a curious contradiction at the heart of I Fear My Pain Interests You by Stephanie LaCava, a novel about pain where the central character is unable to feel it, at least not in a physical sense. Tapping into the ongoing vogue for books about unhappily destructive rich girls, this is Margot’s story. The daughter of a celebrity couple, she has grown up with fame and privilege and an inevitable price to pay for it. A psychotherapist’s dream, Margot’s daddy issues have led to entanglements with unsuitable older men, one of whom attempts to solve the riddle of her congenital insensitivity to pain. Much talked about, this book engaged the brain but left the heart untouched.

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