LITERARY FICTION
GHOST WALL by Sarah Moss
(Granta £12.99, 160pp) IS SARAH MOSS the best British writer never nominated for the Booker?
Fans are already shaking their heads that her new novel — as brief and unsettling as a bolt of lightning — hasn’t made this year’s cut.
Like several of Moss’s books, it views a present-day family drama through the long lens of history.
We join the teenage narrator, Silvie, in Northumberland for an archaeological expedition with her parents, sampling life as lived by bog people in the Iron Age.
Feeling out of place among posher sixth-formers also making the trip, she worries that her toxic home life will be exposed, as we gradually realise her father is an abusive misogynist with a scarily short fuse.
His increasingly unhinged zeal for historical re-enactment nudges the story away from hard-edged realism into surreally nasty terrain that pins us to the page with creeping menace — even if you can’t help but detect a faint whiff of melodrama.
LOVE IS BLIND by William Boyd
(Viking £18.99, 384pp) WILLIAM BOYD has published some fairly average novels lately, and while his latest doesn’t quite shake the sense of an author resting on his laurels, it’s certainly not short on entertainment.
A pan-European romp set at the end of the 19th century, it follows Brodie, a resourceful young Scot who escapes a vicious father to hustle his way to France and beyond.
Gifted with perfect pitch, he gets by as a piano tuner on the opera circuit, but soon finds his professional life and love life unwisely tangled when he falls for Lika, a Russian soprano sharing her bed with Brodie’s star client, Kilbarron, an Irish pianist handy with his fists.
Full of lovelorn yearning and twisty derring-do, Boyd’s storyline pays tribute to the rollicking Victorian yarns of Robert Louis Stevenson and Alexandre Dumas.
Yes, it’s wafer-light, with a romance plot verging on adolescent fantasy, yet his obvious glee in the enterprise wins you over with infectious charm.
KATERINA by James Frey
(John Murray £18.99, 320pp) JAMES FREY achieved notoriety when he owned up to having hoodwinked all and sundry into believing his drughell tell-all A Million Little Pieces (now a film) was fact, not fiction.
Now he’s back with a tone-deaf novel of male mid-life crisis, in which an American writer, James — sorry, ‘Jay’ — recalls the white nights he enjoyed with a Norwegian model, Katerina, while living in Paris in his youth.
His tale unfolds as a bourbonsmeared blur of frenzied couplings in nightclub toilets, intercut with chestbeating pledges to ‘burn the world down’ with his talent.
As a portrait of the artist as a young tearaway, it could have worked, but Frey lacks the self-deprecating irony needed to make the idea fly.
Instead, it’s punishingly crass, and knowing we’re not meant to giggle at Jay’s coked-up swagger perversely makes it all but impossible to respond any other way.