INTERNATIONAL
HITMAN ANDERS AND THE MEANING OF IT ALL by Jonas Jonasson, translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles (4th Estate £8.99) The best- selling author of the madcap The 100-Year- Old-Man Who Climbed Out Of The Window And Disappeared takes a similarly antic approach in his third novel, as a trio of unlikely characters careen across Sweden, desperate to avoid a nasty comeuppance at the hands of a coterie of gangsters.
On paper it sounds like a slaphappy comic caper, but it is a curiously lacklustre read, with unfunny jokes and largely unappealing characters.
Per Persson, an embittered receptionist, and Johanna Kjellander, an atheist priest, cook up a brazenly cynical money-making scheme using the unusual skillset of hitman Anders, whose aggressive approach to disputes is much appreciated by the criminal class.
But when Anders finds Jesus and eschews violence for more peaceful preoccupations, things become problematic and they’re forced to go on the run in a plot that’s too relentlessly zany for its own good. THE MIRROR THIEF by Martin Seay (Melville House £19.99) MARTIN Seay’s debut is an ambitious affair: a lushly detailed hybrid that is part cat-and-mouse conspiracy thriller, part historical adventure, part supernatural mystery, and chock-full of uneasy alliances and sinister situations.
At the heart of the story is a magician called Crivano, ‘who steals an enchanted mirror and is pursued by his enemies through the streets of a haunted city’, and whose actions reflect and refract from the wonders of 16th century glass-making in Venice, to the shady environs of Venice Beach, California, with its poets and cardsharps, to Las Vegas, 2003, and the Venetian casino with its murky gambling floors and high stakes tables. hugely entertaining. ROXY by Esther Gerritsen, translated by Michele Hutchinson (World Editions £9.99) ROXY is in the grip of a strange grief; the troubled 27-year- old doesn’t know which way to turn after the death of her much older husband, Arthur. Mourning him isn’t simple — Arthur died alongside his mistress in a car crash, and roxy’s plunged into confusion, veering from overwhelming loss to all-consuming anger, captured in choppy, conversational sentences.
The unpredictable heroine embarks on a series of erratic adventures — over-the-top drinking, encounters with wildly inappropriate men and an impulsive road trip accompanied by her daughter Louise, the babysitter and Arthur’s assistant, Jane.
She ponders her childhood and her role as a parent to try to rediscover a sense of stability. It’s a tricky ask, as this raw, unsettling book confirms.