LITERARY FICTION
JOHN HARDING
ANNA by Niccolo Ammaniti (Canongate £12.99) TEEN Anna and her younger brother Astor live in a world without adults. A strange plague has swept the world, infecting everyone and becoming fatally active when teenagers reach puberty.
Mostly, the two children stay behind the fence around their Sicilian home, which is piled high with rubbish, and where their mother’s skeleton rests on her bed.
But every day, Anna must venture into the outside world, where gangs of feral children roam in search of food and medicine. And all the time, the clock is ticking towards her own demise as her body matures.
The siblings’ only chance seems to be to reach the mainland, in the hope that some grown-ups may have survived the illness and have a cure for it.
Niccolo Ammaniti’s Italian bestseller has been compared to those classic novels featuring children in a dystopia, Lord Of The Flies and The Road.
Although the characterisation is certainly not in that class, it’s a powerfully disturbing and thought-provoking read. MIDWINTER BREAK by Bernard MacLaverty (Cape £14.99) RETIRED Irish couple Gerry and Stella fly from their Glasgow home to Amsterdam for a midwinter break. But their view on this sightseeing trip soon turns inwards, as they contemplate their marriage and the uncertain future.
Gerry is a stupendously heavy drinker and self-deluded enough to believe that Stella is unaware of his secret forays to buy whisky, conceal it in their hotel room and slug it in the bathroom.
Stella, too, is hiding something — that she is tired of Gerry’s drinking and his mocking of her religion and is considering abandoning him for a Dutch Catholic community.
Bernard MacLaverty’s first novel in 16 years is a heart-rending analysis of the weary affection and annoyances of a long marriage in its fragile twilight years.
Both characters are fully realised, although Gerry’s superhuman consumption of alcohol and blind obedience to its call is enough to drive the average reader to AA and side unequivocally with Stella in her thirst for more meaning in her final years. YUKI MEANS HAPPINESS by Alison Jean Lester (John Murray £16.99) DIANA, a recently qualified nurse, leaves America for Tokyo to become nanny to three-year-old Yuki, whose father, Naoki, is keen that she is brought up learning English from a native speaker.
Yuki’s mother, Emi, has already left the household under circumstances that are not explained to Diana.
Yuki’s name means ‘happiness’, and Diana finds herself increasingly attached to her smiling, bubbly little charge. She settles into a routine of ballet and swimming lessons and a gradual acclimatisation to Japan’s very different values and way of life.
Then the controlling Naoki moves in his pregnant girlfriend, and the household dynamics change.
Diana discovers a dark secret that threatens Yuki and is left with the choice of fleeing or taking action that will inevitably put her and the little girl in peril.
The theme of Alison Jean Lester’s novel is the maternal instinct, movingly evoked here in various guises. It’s funny, warm, scary — and thoroughly recommended.