CONTEMPORARY
THE EARLIE KING AND THE KID IN YELLOW by Danny Denton
(Granta £12.99) THE Ireland in Danny Denton’s dystopian debut is rain-soaked — a non- stop drenching has dampened the hearts and the hopes of the inhabitants, left half the countryside under water and the capital city in the hands of rogue gangsters who sell drugs, traffic people and mete out violent revenge on their rivals.
At the heart of the story is the Kid in Yellow, a scrawny teenager with a head full of poetry, who falls in love with a gang leader’s daughter and goes on the run with their ‘babba’.
But the Earlie King is mythologically powerful and has eyes everywhere, so the Kid’s future is far from assured. This is a dazzlingly inventive adventure in the possibilities of storytelling, as the Kid heads into his future, with danger on his heels and a lush, brash lyricism as armour for the upcoming battle.
RESTLESS SOULS by Dan Sheehan
(Weidenfeld £14.99) ‘WE LOVED each other with a fierceness that no one has the energy for any more,’ says Karl of his relationships with Tom, Baz and Gabriel.
Their friendship was filled with drunken nights out, bad dates and madcap escapades in Dublin. But now that fizzy energy has dissipated: Tom is suicidal after three years in Sarajevo, Baz is battling a short fuse and Karl is mourning the loss of his dead foster brother Gabriel.
Deciding desperate circumstances demand a dramatic solution, they head to California in search of a cure, trying to come to terms with grief, bereavement and broken bonds in this tender, banter-filled debut.
THE CACTUS by Sarah Haywood
(Two Roads £14.99) SUSAN GREEN appears as prickly as her favourite plant, the cactus. Buttoned-up and precise, she’s a stickler for obeying the rules and making sure that everyone else does too; but underneath it all is ‘the terrifying sensation that my carefully constructed life in London is simply the dream of an unhappy girl, a dream from which I am about to be woken’.
Her presentiments prove true when she discovers she’s pregnant at the age of 45, that her estranged brother has a life share in their family home in Birmingham following their mother’s death and that all her long-suppressed emotions are about to scupper her equilibrium in the most unexpected of ways.
Legal battles, lapses of logic and the joys and fears of motherhood are explored in this astute, funny and moving novel of a women learning how to let go.