LITERARY FICTION
THE EXECUTOR by Blake Morrison
(Chatto £16.99) BLAKE MORRISON — best known for his memoir And When Did You Last See Your Father? — has previously voiced regret that he spent the early part of his career as a literary editor, to the detriment of his own writing.
But now, he’s made those office hours work double-time with a highly enjoyable novel narrated by none other than a broadsheet books editor.
Matt is awaiting the birth of his third child when his old pal Robert, a faded poet, asks out of the blue if he’ll be his literary executor — days before dying suddenly from an aneurysm.
Digging through Robert’s papers, Matt unearths incendiary new material that breaks with the poet’s trademark style in favour of autobiographical confessions of adultery, incest, rape and even murder.
Matt wants to publish — but must first get past Robert’s widow.
This is a novel of multi-level brilliance, which offers a smart, funny mystery built around ethical concerns over privacy and biography, while casting a beady eye on workplace politics and male midlife crises.
TRAVELLING IN A STRANGE LAND by David Park
(Bloomsbury £12.99) NORTHERN Irish writer David Park perhaps doesn’t yet have the recognition he deserves, despite prize listings and a BBC adaptation of his post-Troubles novel The Truth Commissioner.
His new novel puts us into the mind of a middle-aged photographer, Tom, as he sets off from Belfast on an epic drive through the snow to fetch his son, Luke, from university in the North East of England in time for Christmas.
Between regular phone calls bringing ‘knock knock’ jokes and baking updates from his ten-year-old daughter Lilly, Tom’s journey stirs painful memories of his eldest son, Daniel, lost in circumstances kept hidden from the reader, but eventually clarified with poleaxing impact.
The strange land of the title is grief, but also parenthood, as Tom thinks how hard it is to find ‘a way of loving your child that gets it right, helps them in whatever way they need, but doesn’t do their heads in’.
Sombre, but unsolemn, with a redemptive, tingling finale, this is a small book bursting with big emotions.
THE KILLING OF BUTTERFLY JOE by Rhidian Brook
(Picador £14.99) BROOK’S acknowledgements in this exuberant, coming-ofage romp thank his agent for supporting his decision to change tack from his previous book, The Aftermath, a portrait of post-war Germany.
This time, he’s off on a zany road trip around Eighties America in the company of Llew, a young Welshman who falls in with a charming — perhaps too charming — butterfly seller, Joe, out to get rich from flogging rare specimens belonging to his estranged father.
The title adds drama as we flash forward at intervals to an unspecified future in which lawmen probe Llew over Joe’s disappearance.
Meanwhile, there’s love (or lust) interest in the shape of Joe’s sisters, into whose tangled ancestry Llew recklessly delves.
Brook seems to have written this bittersweet comedy of sentimental education under the spell of John Irving and, as with Irving, you sense he’s pulling his plot points out of a hat, which makes the larger-than-life fun on offer feel oddly frictionless.