Compelling tales of love, loss and lust
Our pick of the best new fiction
WRITERS & LOVERS ★★★★
Lily King
Picador, £14.99
CASEY, 31, has been blindsided by the loss of her mother, her debts are stratospheric, she’s waitressing to make ends meet and she’s living in a shed beside her brother’s richer friend’s house.
To make matters worse, her heart has been wrecked by a recent romance with the married poet she met at a writers’ retreat. It was an instant, heart-pounding, lustful attraction and she fell head over heels in love before he told her about his complicated relationship with his wife.
So Casey makes some decisions. She’s giving up on love but not on her dream to be a writer and she knuckles down to the novel she’s been working on for a while in the hope of securing a book deal.
But then along comes Silas with a broken-toothed smile and a kind heart, closely followed by widowed Oscar who has two little boys and a successful creative career. Both are keen on Casey but which one will she choose?
Romantic and funny, this smart, witty book takes a wonderfully life-affirming look at love, literature and second chances. EF
SET MY HEART TO FIVE ★★★
Simon Stephenson
4th Estate, £14.99 SET My Heart To Five is a sweet, sentimental film script masquerading as a novel. Set in 2054, it is narrated by Jared, an endearingly “bamboozled” dentist bot who unexpectedly begins to feel emotions.
So he wants to convince the world that robots aren’t the laser-eyed mass killers portrayed in movies, or merely functional devices like toasters; some bots “are toasters that had unfathomably grown hearts”.
Inspired by tearjerker movies such as Field Of Dreams, Forrest Gump and The Shawshank Redemption, Jared heads to Hollywood to make a movie that will share this message.
Along the way he falls in love, unwitting takes part in a “bot hunting” escapade, joins a creative writing class, sheds tears and shares kisses, all while learning some salient life lessons. He tells his story in short, simple sentences – a nod to his stripped-back computer code – but littered with irritating exclamation marks.As the novel also includes excerpts from his mediocre film script, it makes for a frustratingly staccato delivery of a fun idea. EF
LIKE A HOUSE ON FIRE ★★★★
Caroline Hulse
Orion, £14.99
STELLA and George are getting divorced. After 11 years of marriage, scorching attraction has dwindled into blazing rows about open drawers and Jurassic Park, superficial disagreements which hide the real source of their pain – the vexed question of whether to have children or not.
So it’s perhaps not the ideal plan to head to a murder mystery at the home of Stella’s mum Margaret, pretending to be a staunch couple.
To add to the domestic drama, Margaret is coping with a cancer diagnosis while dealing with the frustrations of her just-retired husband Tommy. She’s also worrying about her self-centred son Pete and his unacknowledged gambling habit.
She’s not worried enough about her practically perfect daughter Helen who is stressed beyond belief about her daughter, the eerily selfcomposed 10-year-old Isobel who has developed an unnerving fascination with matches and fire.
Hulse astutely taps into the underlying tensions of family life with a cast of characters who are contrary and compassionate in equal measure as the plot moves from the madcap to the melancholy.A deliciously dark comedy of manners. EF
ONE YEAR OF UGLY ★★★
Caroline Mackenzie
The Borough Press, £12.99
YOLA Palacios is the 24-year-old narrator of Caroline Mackenzie’s jaunty, disingenuous debut which takes the perils of illegal immigration and plays them for laughs.
Bold, bitchy and bookish Yola, alongside her extended family, has escaped crumblingVenezuela for an under-the-radar life in Trinidad. But
her life goes seriously awry when she is caught up in repercussions of her Aunt Celia’s dealings with local gangster Ugly.
Celia has died of a heart attack, owing Ugly a “sell-akidney” amount of money, a fact unknown to the Palacios clan until Ugly turns up at a family barbecue, toting a gun and holding them all responsible for her debt.
The plot becomes ever more over-heated with shoot outs, a virginal aunt becoming a militant renegade and a wholly predictable romance between literary Yola and hot, handsome, poetry-loving Roman, the right-hand man of thuggish Ugly. A well-meaning but unbelievably over-the-top comedy novel. EF
THE ANOINTED ★★★★
Michael Arditti
Arcadia Books, £16.99
AT a time when the gulf between religious fundamentalism and
secularism has become almost impossible to negotiate, Michael Arditti’s concerns have never seemed more relevant.
His 10th novel retells the story of David, who rose from being a shepherd to founder of Jerusalem following his slaying of the Philistine Goliath.
It is told from the points of view of three women: Saul’s youngest daughter Michal who was infatuated with David from the age of 15; the widowed Abigail; and Bathsheba, wife of one of King David’s captains.All of them became his wives, though he had many others. Through the eyes of these women, his heroic status takes a back seat to his more earthbound characteristics.
Driven by an
Alexander-like hunger for conquest and an equally insatiable sexuality, David emerges as a ruthless and unpleasant human being. Arditti’s greatest achievement is to explore the man behind the mask without diminishing his heroic accomplishments. Suffused with a bitter streak of humour, this is neo-Biblical storytelling of a high calibre.The violence and sex are entirely appropriate, allowing the story to breathe, while the suppression of women by patriarchal power -mongers speaks directly to the #MeToo generation. Arditti has given voice to a handful of women unheard for millennia.