LITERARY FICTION
THE BURNING GIRL by Claire Messud (Fleet £16.99) NOVELISTS love to reflect on the power and shortcomings of stories, and Julia, Claire Messud’s narrator, does so to more than usually persuasive effect here.
In her mid-teens when the book begins, Julia’s focus is the events of two years before and her friendship with Cassie, a girl whose waif-like frame belies her strength. The two are inseparable at the start of the summer in question, but already the world has marked them for different paths — middle-class Julia is college bound, whereas fatherless Cassie is lumped in with the troublemakers.
Other cracks appear: a new girl who usurps Julia’s best-friend status, an older boy and, most significantly, Cassie’s mother’s new love, a creepy doctor who sets off jangling alarms in Julia’s mind. But what, really, can Julia know about the events that lead to Cassie’s eventual disappearance?
This is a taut, sure-footed and sobering exploration of girlhood and its narratives; ones that shape female experience, and rarely for the better. GRACE by Paul Lynch (Oneworld £12.99) SET during the terrible Irish famine of the midnineteenth century, this novel comes highly praised by Sebastian Barry and Edna O’Brien. But it’s another Irish writer, Eimear McBride, whom it most brings to mind.
Like McBride, Lynch’s linguistic agility and daring frequently pull the reader up short, his torqued verbs and new coinages springing scenes open.
But it’s not just style that makes this an unforgettable book. Its heroine, 14-year-old Grace, may not have much to say for herself, but her younger brother, Colly, is a gleefully riddling, smutty delight. Separated by a tragedy soon after they are expelled from home to fend for themselves, Colly’s irresistible voice continues to ring in Grace’s ears.
What ensues is full of incident and grotesques, fizzing with adventure, a counter to the enervating effects of their starvation. But gradually it becomes a darker book as hunger eats away at humanity — and the darker it gets, the more his unerring gifts are confirmed. THE SQUEEZE by Lesley Glaister (Salt £14.99) THERE are some things money can’t buy — and plenty it can. Glaister considers both in this novel, which opens in 1989 with the voice of Alis, a young Romanian forced into the sex trade and trafficked to Edinburgh.
With her is Marta, who has long dreamed of a new life in London that will allow her to transform the fortunes of her family back at home. But for both the outlook is bleak until Marta meets Mats, a Norwegian whose career has recently brought him to Scotland.
A good man with a delicate sensibility, Mats is desperate for a child, but his wife — whose side of the story we also hear — slides after childbirth into devastating post-natal depression.
The Squeeze has the pace and plot points of a thriller, and the tension rarely ebbs. It’s also sharply written, and Glaister’s corvid eye for squalor grounds her story skilfully in the queasy humdrum even as the drama ratchets up.