LITERARY FICTION
THE WARDROBE MISTRESS by Patrick McGrath
(Hutchinson £14.99) IT’S January 1947, and bombed-out London is experiencing the coldest winter that anyone can remember. Food and fuel are rationed and, for Joan, the eponymous wardrobe mistress of a West End theatre, life is even grimmer when her husband, the celebrated stage actor Charlie Grice, dies suddenly.
Understudy Frank Stone successfully steps into Charlie’s role as Malvolio in Twelfth Night — and as Joan’s companion in bed. Joan almost believes Charlie’s spirit lives on in his stand-in, but then, she uncovers a shocking secret about her husband.
Patrick McGrath takes us backstage in the London theatre — and you can just about smell the greasepaint. But he also opens out his story to embrace the zeitgeist of the time, the misery and deprivation of post-war Britain, the persistent running sore of fascism and the feeling that life after victory isn’t what it was supposed to be.
A chilling novel of grief, passion and unfulfilled longing, where secrets lurk in every dark alley.
STRANGER by David Bergen
(Duckworth £18.99) ISO is a patients’ assistant at a Guatemalan clinic where wealthy American women go to solve their fertility problems. She falls in love with Eric, a charming, charismatic American doctor, and believes he will leave his wife, who has had treatment at the clinic, for her.
But Eric has a serious motorcycle accident and returns suddenly to the U.S. Iso is pregnant but, though poor, she refuses the clinic director’s demand that she give up her child for adoption.
Rushed into the clinic for the birth, she unwittingly signs over her baby to Eric and his wife.
Determined to recover the child, Iso sets off on a perilous journey, travelling illegally across borders to Mexico, then the U.S. In what is often an edge-of-the-seat trip, this brave, resourceful young woman puts to the test notions of what borders are and questions the entitlements they give us.
DINNER AT THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH by Nathan Englander
(W&N £14.99) KIDNAPPED from Paris after betraying his Israeli secret service masters for humanitarian reasons, Z has been held captive in a secret prison in the Israeli desert for 12 years, his guard his sole companion.
The only other person who knows he is there — and so the only man who can order his release — is the General, to whom Z frequently writes, asking to be set free. But Z doesn’t know the reason for the General’s lack of reply is that, for years, he has been in a coma — and there is little chance he will awaken.
In Englander’s Kafkaesque novel, the situations of the two men grimly reflect one another: each is locked in limbo.
Z can do nothing but think of the past and where his life went wrong, revealed to the reader in a series of often gripping flashbacks. Meanwhile, although politics seem incapable of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian problem, love finds a way through the impasse via the tunnels beneath the border.