LITERARY FICTION
THIS LOVE by Lotte Jeffs
(Dialogue €21, 432pp) MAE and Ari meet at the sticky end of a tequilablasted night out. She is gay, confident and flits merrily from one affair to the next; his sexual preference and general disposition are harder to pin down. Both English students at Leeds University, something between them sparks nonetheless, and soon the pair are a hot, albeit platonic, couple, sharing beds, confidences and, before long, hopes for the future. But first both must negotiate their past.
Mae needs to reckon with a loving if clumsy family she is convinced can’t handle her sexuality; Ari is haunted by all manner of demons from his privileged upbringing in Upper East Side, New York.
This Love has been dubbed One Day for Gen-Z and, as Mae and Ari’s friendship unfolds across a ten-year period, it charts its twists and turns with appealingly breezy, emotionally attuned prose. It’s all a bit lite, though, and sometimes feels more like a manifesto in praise of alternative forms of family and love than a novel to really sink your teeth into.
THE LODGERS by Holly Pester
(Granta €21, 224pp) THE raging instability of the housing market and its impact on Generation Rent find rare poetic expression in this arresting debut.
In her childhood hometown, a woman has taken a sublet to keep an eye on her mother. She must share with another lodger, whose possible appearance at any given point keeps the woman on edge as she ekes out her days in her cheerless little rental, with its ‘staffroomish table and chairs’ and ‘buy-tolet laminate flooring throughout’.
Part of her, though, is haunted by the flat she has left and where she imagines someone else, referred to only as ‘you’, now living alongside a single mother and her daughter.
The novel toggles between these two perspectives, the haunting oddness of the writing effectively conveying the existential dislocation brought on by cheap rented accommodation.
Don’t go expecting much by way of plot. Do, though, relish a novel that sharply captures the precarity of basic 21st-century living. ‘One day you came back to the flat and a friendly note from “Bev” saying she needed more money and planned on letting the flat through Airbnb. “Take care, love Bev.” ’
THE DJINN WAITS A HUNDRED YEARS by Shubnum Khan
(Magpie €21, 320pp) A DILAPIDATED mansion by the sea in Durban, South Africa. A dusty, long-locked bedroom, crammed with diaries and letters. A djinn — or spirit — who lives in its own room in the house. And an awkward 15-year-old girl, who lost her twin sister not long after birth and who is haunted by that sister’s not always benign spirit.
This lush novel expertly weaves the story of teenage Sana, who has moved with her father to the mansion, now split into cheap apartments full of gloriously oddball Indian residents, with that of Akbar Manzil, an Indian who travelled from Bombay a hundred years previously with dreams of building a lavish home for his family and menagerie of exotic pets. Linking both stories is Meena, Manzil’s second wife, and whose diaries contain clues to some of the mysteries haunting the house. In lively, beautiful prose that seems to almost dance across the page, Khan expertly repackages gothic and supernatural tropes into a richly imagined coming of age treat.