LITERARY FICTION
THE PARTY by Elizabeth Day
(Fourth Estate £12.99) YOU might feel like you’ve read this one before — privileged scion of an aristocratic family is befriended by a psychopathic outsider. But although those other famous outsiders, Ripley and Gatsby, lurk in the shadows of Day’s novel, her decision to locate the action among the Chipping Norton set lends it zest.
Signifiers of class and privilege are skewered with a particularly sharp eye — popcorn-coated tuna amuse-bouche, anyone? — and the follies of the rich and powerful are seized on with glee.
Although the novel’s Ripley character, Martin, is gloriously creepy, his wife Lucy is the real dark horse. First encountered decrying the sexism of the ‘great American novel’, her apparently meek exterior conceals murky depths.
The Party is framed by scenes set in a police incident room, which might lead you to expect the existence of a more explosive secret than the one that emerges. Nevertheless, Day’s combination of brio and suspense makes for a formidable narrative motor.
HOW SAINTS DIE by Carmen Marcus
(Harvill Secker £14.99) IF YOU liked Kate Hamer’s runaway bestseller The Girl In The Red Coat, chances are you’ll be beguiled by this atmospheric Eighties Yorkshire-set debut.
Marcus’s Red Riding Hood is ten-yearold Ellie, whose mother, Kate, is in hospital after a suicide attempt. Kate’s fisherman husband has been doing his best to care for their child, but at school she is shunned by classmates and mercilessly picked on by their teacher.
Fortunately newcomer and fellow misfit Fletch proves an ally and, inspired by Kate’s Catholicism, the two bond over re-enactments of their favourite saints’ deaths. But Ellie has another, more sinister companion — a wolf that viscerally embodies the dangers of her complex, emotionally fraught home-life.
The dramatic and metaphorical strands of Marcus’s narrative are densely woven, and Ellie is a winning protagonist, clinging to her father’s stories like a life-raft amidst the tumult. But it is the sensitively drawn sorrows and vulnerabilities of the novel’s adults that are perhaps most affecting.
BEFORE EVERYTHING by Victoria Redel
(Sceptre £14.99) FOUR women descend on a secluded Massachusetts house. These are the Old Friends, gathered to keep vigil as another of their gang, Anna, lies stricken with cancer.
Before Everything is intended to be a celebration of female friendship, so as Anna enters her final days there’s ample opportunity for mawkishness. But although the narrative does occasionally verge on the cloying, Redel’s prose is brisk.
A bigger problem is her compulsive, if well-intentioned, box-ticking — that five women could embody so completely the spectrum of contemporary female experience seems utterly improbable.
And the irony is that when they succeed in transcending their types they’re most interesting: no one in this story is a saint, even Anna’s hospice nurse, who admits secretly to lacking empathy.
Terminal illness doesn’t always bring out the best in people, nor does it preclude other sorrows. To find an honest and sympathetic reflection of both truths is refreshing.