> ARRIVALS

Unforgettable stories make for the most compelling books. Here are five new novels with strong female characters and stories to match. The Last Romantics, Tara Conklin, HarperCollins The woman who relates her family’s history is Fiona Skinner. It is 2079 and she is 102, standing before an audience discussing her masterwork, The Love Poem, which she wrote 80 years before. She begins in 1981 with the death of her father, after which her mother retired to her bedroom for several years, a period the four Skinner children henceforth refer to as the Pause. It is during this period that they learn to fend for themselves and one another. Each goes on to lives of significance and moment. Highly recommended. Adèle Leila Slimani, Penguin Adèle is Leila Slimani’s first novel, released in France in 2014 and now published in English following the massive success last year of her second novel, The Perfect Nanny. Adèle is a character study of a Paris journalist with a seemingly enviable life – surgeon husband, young son, elegant apartment. And yet Adèle, bored by her bourgeois existence, endangers everything because of her attraction to sex with strangers and acquaintances. The opposite of an erotic novel, the writing is cool and uninflected. The Age of Light, Whitney Scharer, Little Brown This historical novel is based on the life of Lee Miller, the Vogue model who famously said, “I’d rather take a photograph than be one,” whereupon she became the protégé and lover of the Surrealist photographer Man Ray. Whitney Scharer’s first novel has a dual timeline. The first documents Miller’s relationship with Man Ray in the early ’30s, beginning with their surreal meeting in 1929 in a Paris opium den, concluding in1932 when she chose her art over her heart. This interlude is punctuated by the arc of her life, as a Vogue model, photographer, war correspondent, as cooking columnist and cooking columnist. The Red Address Book, Sofia Lundberg, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Doris is 96, living alone in Stockholm. She spends her days gathering memories from her old address book of those who have passed through her eventful life — as a rural Swedish girl, as a “living mannequin” in Paris, as a young woman pursuing the love of her life. Thanks to a caregiver, Doris has technology which allows her to make a permanent record of those longago events, a gift to her beloved American grandniece, Jenny, and the readers of this charming novel. The Island of Sea Women, Lisa See, Scribner The setting of Lisa See’s eleventh novel is Jeju, a Korean island with a distinct language and traditions, the most unusual of which is a gender reversal wherein the women divers — the haenyeo — work the seas for abalone, shellfish and other treasures while the men assume the domestic duties and child rearing. At the centre of this multi-generational tale are two haenyeo, Young-sook, born to the sea, and Mi-ja, the child of a man who collaborated with the Japanese. A story about a real society that at times reads like a masterwork of speculative fiction.