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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I’ve soldiered through Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro waiting to be gripped by a revelation of the kind that Ishiguro’s excellent Never Let Me Go offered. There is a revelation, sort of, but it comes late and there’s too much treading water before you get there to sustain interest. Strangely, I felt very similar to what I did while reading Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, a sense of boredom combined with a sense of obligation to keep reading this Nobel Prize winning author whose earlier books Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day, I loved.

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