MUST READS
Out now in paperback
OVER SHARING by Jane Fallon
(Penguin €12.60, 400pp) ON HER 40th birthday, Iris’s husband Tom announced that he was leaving her for someone he’d met through work. Distraught, Iris does some online research, only to find that Maddy, the woman for whom Tom has left her, is a hugely popular influencer, who posts endless videos of herself, her husband and their adorable baby twins.
Iris decides to take revenge. Finding Maddy via her lifecoaching website proves relatively easy. But discreet snooping at the family home in the pretty town of Marlow reveals that the reality of Maddy’s situation is very different from the upbeat Instagram videos.
Jane Fallon’s bestselling novel is a grippingly dark story of revenge and redemption.
IN MEMORIAM by Alice Winn (Viking €14, 400pp)
ALICE WINN’S heartrending novel begins in 1914. At Preshute boarding school, best friends Ellwood and Gaunt (they never use each other’s first names) are both outsiders: Ellwood, captivatingly blessed with looks and charm, is Jewish. Gaunt, intense, awkward and a boxing champion, is half-German.
They know their feelings for each other cannot be acknowledged in the school environment of casual brutality. Urged by his Prussian mother, Gaunt volunteers for the Belgian front while Ellwood remains at school.
A gulf opens between Gaunt’s experience of the horror of warfare and Ellwood’s idealistic schoolboy vision — soon to be shattered when he, too, joins up. Vivid, moving and unflinching in its depiction of forbidden love, In Memoriam is an unforgettable debut.
WIFEDOM by Anna Funder (Penguin €15.95, 464pp)
SEVEN biographies of Orwell — all by men — noted that he married Eileen O’Shaughnessy in 1936 — yet Eileen scarcely figured in these accounts.
Intrigued by this mysteriously invisible woman, author and human rights lawyer Funder read six letters from Eileen to her best friend, written in the early days of her marriage, which revealed a clever, witty woman who died aged 39, and has been all but erased from Orwell’s life.
In her brilliantly original book, Funder blends Eileen’s voice with fictional passages based on her life. The result is a vivid portrait of a fierce, funny, resourceful woman who has emerged at last from the long shadow cast by her husband.