Five new novels to read in March
• From a compelling and atmospheric portrayal of Nigeria to Prague and a campus in the US
INEQUALITY, CORRUPTION AND POWER STRUGGLES
Nigerian megachurch pastors are known for their voracious appetite for power and wealth, along with entrapping desperate congregants financially and sexually and staging fake miracles. But there’s a complex relationship between religion, society and economy in Nigeria and these religious con men wield significant influence.
In Gaslight, Femi Kayode’s vivid and engaging second novel following his acclaimed 2021 debut, Lightseekers, investigative psychologist Philip Taiwo looks into the arrest of Bishop Dawodu. He’s suspected of murdering his missing wife, Folasade, and Philip, despite his scepticism about organised religion, takes on the case at the request of his devout sister.
Kayode seamlessly weaves outsider Philip’s personal life into the murder investigation. At home in Lagos, Philip has to confront his 15-year-old daughter, Lara, caught taking money from her mother. When he discovers why, he realises that his family has not quite escaped the racism and colourism he thought they had left behind in America: “We never worried about our daughter because by the time we should have, we were already in Nigeria, where everyone was black.”
Gaslight is a cleverly plotted mystery where nothing is what it seems. Kayode explores the complexities of inequality, corruption and power dynamics in modern Nigeria, tackling prejudice and racism, he maintains an even-handed approach. Richly detailed and nuanced, it is a compelling portrayal of Nigeria.
GENRE-DEFYING STORYTELLING
A new offering from Helen Oyeyemi is always a creative delight. Her storytelling weaves together the fantastical with the real, as she delves into themes of identity, race, and family. With a unique talent for creating stories that challenge readers’ perceptions, she asks deep, unsettling questions about society and humanity.
Her latest novel, Parasol Against the Axe, takes place during a bachelorette weekend in the mysterious, everchanging city of Prague, where Oyeyemi has lived since 2014.
On the night she arrives, the protagonist, Hero Tojosoa, who regrets attending, begins reading a mysterious book her teenage son has given her. Called Paradoxical Undressing, it’s about the city’s history and it changes each time it’s opened. Hero discovers that the party’s other guests are reading the same book and having the same disconcerting experience. What follows is a surreal journey where time and reality blur as her friend Sofie’s party carries on around her.
The New York Times calls it “a shape-shifting novel about the power of stories … Helen Oyeyemi is a literary pied piper — her voice is the kind that readers gamely follow into the most bewildering and unnerving of situations.”
Like her literary predecessors, Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, Oyeyemi is fascinated with intricate narratives and the exploration of infinite possibilities within fiction. She skilfully employs metafictional devices that challenge the reader’s perception and engage with the nature of storytelling itself. Drawing on a vast array of cultural, historical and literary references, Oyeyemi has produced a disorientating and wonderfully weird novel.
REVENGE AS RECLAMATION
In Rinsing Mkami’s Soul,
Kenyan-born, UK-based comedian and author Njambi
McGrath, the award-winning innocence disregarded, she’s author of Through the Leopard’s left with nothing to do but seek Gaze (2020), critically examines vengeance. society’s conflicting attitudes McGrath’s incisive novel towards gender, sexuality and questions revenge as a means the possibility of redemption. of reclaiming power from
In this thought-provoking rapists. She explores the narrative, the protagonist, legitimacy of anger when a Mkami, a young Kenyan paternalistic society slutshames scholarship student at a and unjustly condemns prestigious boarding school, a young girl for her poor falls victim to trickery that judgment. results in her pregnancy and Isabelle Dupuy, author of expulsion from school. Living the Dream, writes:
Her life spirals into chaos. “McGrath takes us on a gritty With her family disappointed in yet spirited ride through 1980s her, and her claims of Kenya, a society wrestling with corruption and grief in the wake of independence. McGrath is a talented writer. She manages to balance brutal realities with a light humorous touch that make Rinsing Mukami’s Soul a meaningful and entertaining read.”
WHAT DARK, SATIRICAL WORLD IS THIS?
A campus novel written in the style of Roth, Bellow and Updike? Surely not. While American academia is reimagining the literary canon, How I Won a Nobel Prize by
Julius Taranto sends up both radical wokery and right-wing populism.
The novel follows Helen, a young Jewish woman, and her mentor, Perry Smoot, a Nobel prize-winning scientist, and their quest to combat climate change. When Smoot’s part in a student sex scandal is exposed, she must choose whether to give up her research or accompany him to an island off the coast of Maine where a university called the Rubin Institute, Plymouth (RIP), has been established by a dodgy financier to provide safe harbour to the disgraced and the deplorable — those #MeToo-ed or stripped of status by the woke brigade.
Helen’s husband, Hew, is uncomfortable with RIP and gets involved in protests with the group Action for Justice. A violent counter-protest, during which the sinister Knights of the Right murder several protesters, causes Helen to undertake a cost-benefit analysis of their relationship.
How I Won a Nobel Prize is illuminating for its deep engagement with science and electromagnetics. With a nod to Schrodinger’s cat as metaphor for uncertainty in human affairs, it’s also a wonderfully entertaining and upbeat exploration of our current culture wars.
COULD THIS BE AN ELABORATE EXPERIMENT?
Could a daughter’s impulsive actions put her whole family in danger? Set in a Virginia suburb during the lockdown of summer 2020, Angie Kim’s Happiness Falls grips readers from the start: “We didn’t call the police right away. Later, I would blame myself, wonder if things might have turned out differently if I hadn’t shrugged it off, insisting Dad wasn’t missing but just delayed, probably still in the woods looking for Eugene, thinking he’d run off somewhere. Mom says it wasn’t my fault, that I was merely being optimistic, but I know better. I don’t believe in optimism. I believe there’s a fine line (if any) between optimism and wilful idiocy, so I try to avoid optimism altogether, lest I fall over the line mistakenly.”
When 20-year-old Mia Parkinson’s father disappears while on a hike with her autistic and non-verbal brother, Eugene, who returns visibly upset and unable to describe what happened, her life is turned upside down.
What follows is a story about language, science, the complexities of DNA, and perception.
As the family grapples with loss, Mia begins to read her father’s research notes on happiness. Is her father’s disappearance an elaborate experiment, a desire to escape the responsibilities of caregiving, or is something more sinister going on?
Kim’s assured novel has been praised for its insightful representation of disability and its exploration of love, neurodiversity and how we make decisions — all wrapped up in a literary mystery that’s both moving and fascinating.