LITERARY FICTION
ALTERNATE SIDE by Anna Quindlen (Scribner £14.99)
ANNA QUINDLEN won the Pulitzer Prize for her columns in The New York Times, and the city and its racial and economic faultlines provide the catalyst for this, her tenth novel.
Fundraiser Nora Nolan and her banker husband Charlie live on one of the Upper West Side’s rare dead-end blocks. No prizes for spotting the metaphor: Nora is well aware that their 25-year marriage has run its course.
Matters come to a head when Ricky, the street’s indispensible Puerto Rican handyman, is assaulted by one of the Nolans’ wealthy neighbours. Or was it — as Charlie maintains to Nora’s amazement — just an accident?
This is a purposefully understated tale, but in spite of the ugliness of the central incident and the domestic discord it brings to the surface, you never feel much is at stake.
On the plus side, Quindlen’s satirical darts have no problems finding their middle-class Manhattanite targets, but her sharp-eyed observations fall victim to a half-hearted plot, while Nora herself is oddly lacking in oomph.
GRACE’S DAY by William Wall (Head of Zeus £16.99)
‘GRACE’S day’ refers to an occasion not of triumph, but of tragedy, in this brooding novel by the poet and former Booker nominee Wall. We begin on a remote Irish island, where Grace and her sisters, Jeannie and Em, live with Jane, their psychologically fragile mother.
All four provide fodder for Jane’s writer husband Tom, who observes from a distance rather than suffer first-hand the hardships of self-sufficiency — male artists are irredeemable humbugs here.
Meanwhile, Grace and Jeannie take turns to watch over toddler Em. Then one day when Grace is in charge, Em dies in a terrible accident.
The consequences are revealed years later in chapters narrated alternately by Jeannie and Grace. Grace is now a psychologist whose protective irony and chilling, comfortless insights underscore her own damage. It’s this mood of lives irreparably spoiled, rather than a couple of 11th-hour revelations, that make this bitter-tasting tale so potent.
A DOUBLE LIFE by Flynn Berry (W&N £14.99)
THE 1974 disappearance of Lord Lucan inspired this thriller by American author Flynn Berry — although, as she informs us in a disclaimer, her characters are entirely fictional. Our narrator is Claire, daughter of the charming, chameleon-like Lord Spenser, who brutally murdered Claire’s nanny and nearly killed her mother when Claire was just eight years old.
Now 34 and a GP in London, she’s determined to track down her father, who apparently vanished into thin air.
But if she does succeed in finding him, what then?
This is less the story of a double life than a half life, one not just shaped, but warped, by trauma and obsession. The parallels between Claire and her painkiller-addicted brother are left for us to draw.
Berry is an exceptionally efficient writer with a gift for crafting scenes of cinematic immediacy, which means that although her overly-neat denouement doesn’t really convince, this is still a compulsive page-turner.