Megan Hunter uses words sparingly. In her startlingly poetic debut, The End We Start From (Picador £9.99), she even rations her letters. She calls her characters R and Z and each paragraph is only a sentence or two long. Hunter tangles the delight and disorientation of new motherhood with scenes of societal collapse. As everything seems to be ending, as London floods, a new life begins, hot and pink and hungry. Hunter writes with delicacy and precision; her imagery is pearlescent in places. It’s a sliver of a novel, but it shimmers.
New motherhood is also central to Polly Clark’s elegant debut, Larchfield (Quercus £14.99). Set in Helensburgh, where Clark now lives, the novel intertwines the story of WH Auden’s time as a teacher at a boys’ school with the story of Dora, living in a new house with a new baby, who begins to feel the world closing in on her. She falls out with their religious upstairs neighbours, and with the health visitor too. Though the scenes in which Dora’s storyline finally collides with Auden’s don’t quite gel, Clark has written a measured and graceful novel; this is particularly true of the way she handles Dora’s gradual unravelling.
Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine (HarperCollins £12.99) also explores the ways in which people cope – or fail to cope – with the things life throws at them. Eleanor Oliphant’s social skills are somewhat lacking. She doesn’t really understand other people, and that suits her fine, but when she suddenly develops a crush on a musician, she’s forced to engage with the world, to make friends and to expose herself emotionally.
Gradually, we learn disturbing things about her past, which put her slightly alien behaviour into context. Honeyman fills this story of trauma and survival with skewed humour. Eleanor is infuriating – she can be rude and abrasive – but she’s also endearing and her growth in confidence is heartening and moving.
Film critic Xan Brooks’s The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times (Salt £8.99), set after the first world war, is a macabre and unsettling tale of a young girl who is made a plaything of the “funny men”, a group of damaged soldiers, so badly injured they have removed themselves from the world completely. The novel has a woozy, tainted fairytale quality – Brooks calls these molten men of his the Tin Man and the Scarecrow – and a heightened aspect, like looking at the world through a cracked magnifying glass. It’s a bizarre, horror-flecked novel, pleasingly distinctive in its oddness.
Young Dublin writer Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends (Faber & Faber, £14.99) is a more conventional coming-of-age novel, but one of poise and intimacy. Frances is a poet who embarks on a complicated relationship with Nick, an older married man, the actor husband of a woman who is writing an article about her. She has similarly complicated feelings for her friend Bobbi and has to deal with a medical diagnosis that further impacts on her sense of self. There’s a control and clarity to Rooney’s writing that pulls the occasionally meandering plot into focus. Frances’s story is always engaging, her responses layered.
The young female protagonist of Olivia Sudjic’s Sympathy (Pushkin Press £14.99), millennial Alice, develops an obsessive interest with Mizuko. It is an infatuation fuelled by the artificial intimacy of lives lived online, stoked by follows and likes. There has been little affection in Alice’s life, and in Mizuko she finds an emotional outlet, a person to latch on to. Sudjic’s book is stylish and smart, but its iPhone-smooth coolness, while a key part of its appeal, becomes wearying after a while.
Elif Batuman’s The Idiot (Jonathan Cape £16.99) is another tale of a young woman navigating life. Batuman, author of essay collection The Possessed, has interesting ideas about what novels can do and should be. In this not-quite-Bildungsroman, she resists meaning and plot as she describes the experiences of Turkish American Selin, a student at Harvard. Seilin takes courses in linguistics and something called “constructed worlds”; she studies Russian, hangs out with charismatic Serbian Svetlana and falls for a senior called Ivan. The Idiot is full of extraneous detail and riffs on linguistic theory. Set in the 1990s, when the internet was still foal-like and benign, it, intentionally and intriguingly, already has the feel of a historical novel. It might have bordered on the insufferable were it not for Batuman’s wit and lightness of touch, the way she backs up her smarts with a sense of fun.
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