DEBUT FICTION
IDAHO by Emily Ruskovich (Chatto & Windus £14.99) Ann is Wade Mitchell’s second wife, who may have unwittingly caused the horror that deprived him of Jenny, his first.
Set half- way up an Idaho mountain, where the family scratches a living in semiisolation, this debut novel explores memory through a complicated back- and- forth narrative, and convincingly plumbs the depths of grief and guilt in the wake of extreme tragedy.
The story is driven by Ann’s urgent need to find out just what happened that day in the woods when Mitchell’s first family was destroyed, a quest she pursues against the resistance of her husband’s encroaching premature dementia.
Meanwhile, Jenny lives a twilight existence in the state’s most secure women’s penitentiary.
ruskovich’s writing is well crafted and poetic, particularly when evoking nature and weather in the backwoods, and the contrast with Jenny’s claustrophobic prison half-life is extremely well done. A sad, involving read.
DARKE by Rick Gekoski (Canongate £16.99) rETIrEd schoolmaster James darke is having a late-life crisis triggered by the death of Suzy, his wife of 40 years.
He is no kindly, cardiganed Mr Chips, but an embittered curmudgeon. He people-proofs his house to exclude human contact, especially with his daughter lucy, and directs a stream of invective against a long list of pet hates, from conceptual art to weddings and ‘ frigid snitbag Virginia Woolf’.
We’re told how he and Suzy met, married, raised their daughter and grew middle-aged — and we learn in grisly detail of her fatal cancer.
readers of a certain age will enjoy Gekoski’s sardonic take on England from the mid- 20th century to the first years of the 21st. But as darke cautiously re- emerges into the light, the emphasis shifts to one man’s despair and how he survives it.
HISTORY OF WOLVES by Emily Fridlund (W&N £12.99) BrouGHT up in the Minnesotan woods by parents who are the only survivors of a disbanded commune, 14-year- old linda is solitary, left to her own devices and alert to her surroundings. She is intrigued by the relationship struck up by teacher Mr Grierson and pupil lily Holburn, which results in his dismissal.
At the same time, she befriends Patra and Paul, a mother and her four-year-old son, who move into a house across the lake.
She and Patra become close, but when leo, Patra’s husband, joins his family, things take a strange, then tragic, turn.
Fridland’s writing is vivid: her natural descriptions elicit a superb sense of place.
Grim foreboding hangs over every scene as the older linda looks back and tells this comingof-age story as it unravels over a traumatic and formative year.