LITERARY FICTION
GOD HELP THE CHILD
by Toni Morrison
(Chatto £14.99)
WHEN Bride walks into a room, she draws looks of envy and desire. It wasn’t always the way.
The ebony skin that she now sets off with pearls attracted very different kinds of looks when she was a girl, even from her own lighter- skinned mother. It left Bride prepared to do almost anything to win a kind maternal word.
Still only in her early 20s, Bride seems to have left all that far behind. She’s living in California and is about to launch her own cosmetics line when her childhood returns to haunt her.
Within the space of a few days, her boyfriend walks out, she’s badly assaulted, and a former teacher she helped put behind bars for child abuse is released. There’s more, too: her body seems to be reverting to prepubescence.
Forced to take time off from work, she decides to track down her errant boyfriend, and in the process learns plenty about him and also herself.
This fable- like novel is told from multiple viewpoints, some more powerful than others. Though slender by comparison with Morrison’s best works, it still has much to say about racism within the black community and the lasting damage a parent can inflict on a child.
DEMONS
by Wayne Macauley
(Text Publishing £10.99)
IT SEEMS like a fine idea. Four couples decide to leave behind their careers and kids for a weekend, and head out to a remote beach house. This is Australia but it’s also wintertime, so there’ll be no surfing or outdoor grilling. Nor will there be any mobile phones or television, because they’ve made a pact to do nothing but cook, sip wine and tell stories.
That’s the plan, at least. But late in the evening, long after Megan and Evan, Adam and Lauren, and Leon and Hannah have settled in, Marshall, a politician, finally pitches up. He’s without his wife but has his phone-toting teenage daughter Tilly in tow. His brother-in-law killed himself earlier that afternoon, it turns out, and his wife and daughter hold Marshall responsible.
The group tries to keep the weekend on track, drinking and telling tales of murder, desire and cruel twists of fate. True stories, they claim, but Marshall’s real life drama soon threatens to overshadow them all. The fierce rainstorm that engulfs the house is nothing compared to the chaos that will descend when it clears, as this sly social satire evolves into the story of a politician’s rapid downfall.
Its message? Never underestimate the power of a Tweeting teen.
VILLA AMERICA
by Liza Klaussmann
(Picador £14.99)
TENDER Is The Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s jazzage classic, is dedicated ‘To Sara and Gerald, Many Fêtes’. The Murphys, that same husband and wife, occupy the centre of Liza Klaussmann’s grand yet gossipy second novel, in which they’re joined in the South of France by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Cole and Linda Porter and, of course, the Fitzgeralds.
It begins across the Atlantic, with Sara and Gerald’s American childhoods, alike only in terms of their affluence. While Sara grows up in a nurturing family fond of travel, Gerald is left to the mercy of a cold, authoritarian father.
They nevertheless sense something in each other — a hunger to do things differently — and are drawn together even though their marriage requires Gerald to repress what he calls his ‘true nature’.
They and their three children eventually gravitate to the French Riviera, where they create an enchanted world and host party after party. But moving through the throngs of artistic celebrities is another American, an enigmatic WWI pilot. He’s sucked into their world and when tragedy strikes, it sends him reeling, too.
Romance, mystery and glamour make for a classy page-turner, yet there’s nothing escapist about the questions it poses regarding how to live.