LITERARY FICTION
HOW I WON A NOBEL PRIZE by Julius Taranto (Picador €21, 304pp)
THIS first novel from New York writer Taranto pulls off an unlikely conjuring trick by dishing up an addictive page-turner centred on two, perhaps equally forbidding, subjects: physics and cancel culture.
Helen is a gifted postgraduate working on the question of hightemperature superconductivity — or how to stop wires getting too hot as her widowed father’s girlfriend thinks of it. The solution she’s working on has the potential to combat climate change, but then her supervisor is disgraced by a sex scandal — only to land on his feet at a new campus founded by an anti-woke gazillionaire.
When Helen joins him, her right-on husband opts to hold his nose and tag along too. Cue domestic disharmony and topical farce that sharpens when online protests against the new campus take violent real-world shape.
Avoiding the cheap point-scoring that tends to weigh down this type of exercise, Taranto unspools a twisty satire with verve and sass.
FERVOUR by Toby Lloyd (Sceptre €24.65, 320pp)
FIRST-TIME author Lloyd splices paranormal chills with domestic intrigue in this tense debut about the disintegration of a devout Jewish family who suspect their daughter is possessed. Elsie’s journalist mother, Hannah, is about to publish a book drawn on the memories of her fatherin-law, a Holocaust survivor living in their London attic.
But then Elsie vanishes from her posh private school, only to return talking about the dead people she can see — including a boy her grandfather encountered as a prisoner in Treblinka. Part of the novel is narrated by a university pal of Elsie’s older brother Toyvah, whose secular outlook leads him to think the cause of his sister’s behaviour lies closer to home, not least when the strife puts fresh ink in Hannah’s pen.
A rich and dark stew that mixes ingredients from the Bible and the headlines, with a biting send-up of the vampiric nature of writing itself.
BLESSINGS by Chukwuebuka Ibeh (Viking €21.75, 256pp)
ZADIE SMITH and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie are among early fans of this coming-of-age debut from a 22-year-old Nigerian writer boldly addressing repressive attitudes to homosexuality in his home country.
The action starts when Obiefuna, a teenager in the city of Port Harcourt, is banished to a brutally harsh Christian boarding school after his tyrannical father senses his attraction to another boy brought into the household to help with the family business.
As Obiefuna finds his nascent sexuality violently shaped in the hothouse environment of the dorm, we also sit in on a looming tragedy facing his mother, Uzoamaka, likewise a victim of her husband.
We toggle between parent and child as the novel unfolds against the tumultuous backdrop of Nigerian politics in the early 21st century.
Stark yet tender, balancing passages of hope with episodes of gut-plummeting sadness, this is an accomplished novel, distinguished by sensitive prose and taut scene-making.