A trafficked girl proves an unsettling presence, teenage twins struggle to escape their past – and the man who posed as the Yorkshire Ripper, John Humble, is brought to vivid life
As a new crop of debut novelists sets out to remind us, entire lives can turn on the slenderest of moments. Take Margaret Benson, the middle-aged narrator of Alex Hourston’s slyly compelling In My House (Faber, £14.99). She’s standing in line for the loo at Gatwick airport when a teenage girl catches her eye in the mirror and mouths a single word: help.
Margaret ends up rescuing Anja from a trafficker but that’s just the beginning. Soon, the girl has become her cleaner. Though she fills a void in the older woman’s emotional life, there’s plenty about her – and the questions she asks – that’s unsettling, enabling Hourston to galvanise Margaret’s low-key delivery with a very persuasive thread of menace.
Eye contact proves just as pivotal in The Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan (Harvill Secker, £12.99). The latest book to be set in a futuristic, waterlogged dystopia, The Gracekeepers depicts a world where citizens fall into two categories: “damplings”, whose floating lives are at sea, and “landlockers”, the privileged few who cling to surviving archipelagos. Against this backdrop, Logan conjures a story of star-crossed lovers that, for all its promise, almost capsizes beneath its burden of gender theory.
In Julia Rochester’s The House at the Edge of the World (Viking, £12.99), it’s a father’s drunken stumbling that kickstarts the lives of twins Morwenna and Corwin. Shortly after their 18th birthday, he falls to his death from cliffs near their Devonshire home, sending the girls fleeing in opposite directions to begin new lives. But as every keen reader knows, the past is not so easily left behind, and this poised, lightly witty novel is not out to prove otherwise.
More
Margaret ends up rescuing Anja from a trafficker but that’s just the beginning. Soon, the girl has become her cleaner. Though she fills a void in the older woman’s emotional life, there’s plenty about her – and the questions she asks – that’s unsettling, enabling Hourston to galvanise Margaret’s low-key delivery with a very persuasive thread of menace.
Eye contact proves just as pivotal in The Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan (Harvill Secker, £12.99). The latest book to be set in a futuristic, waterlogged dystopia, The Gracekeepers depicts a world where citizens fall into two categories: “damplings”, whose floating lives are at sea, and “landlockers”, the privileged few who cling to surviving archipelagos. Against this backdrop, Logan conjures a story of star-crossed lovers that, for all its promise, almost capsizes beneath its burden of gender theory.
In Julia Rochester’s The House at the Edge of the World (Viking, £12.99), it’s a father’s drunken stumbling that kickstarts the lives of twins Morwenna and Corwin. Shortly after their 18th birthday, he falls to his death from cliffs near their Devonshire home, sending the girls fleeing in opposite directions to begin new lives. But as every keen reader knows, the past is not so easily left behind, and this poised, lightly witty novel is not out to prove otherwise.
More
No comments:
Post a Comment