LITERARY FICTION
TIRZAH AND THE PRINCE OF CROWS by Deborah Kay Davies
(Oneworld £14.99, 400 pp) SET in the Seventies, this spellbinding coming-of-age story follows a biblically named heroine, 16-year-old Tirzah, living in a close-knit Christian community in the Welsh valleys.
She’s a straight-A student, but distraction arrives when she starts seeing her male friend, Osian, in a new light while embarking on a sexual relationship with another boy, Brân, encountered while roaming in the woods.
Davies keeps us on our toes by sliding seamlessly from the mundane (Curly Wurlys, cheese and potato pasties from the Co-op) to the mythical, as Tirzah’s trysts with the near-feral Brân (‘crow’ in Welsh, an allusion to a figure from Welsh legend) take on an almost otherworldly dimension.
But as Tirzah finds herself pregnant, causing scandal, Davies keeps a steady eye on the girl’s complicated feelings.
There’s a shocking, grisly moment near the end, but for all the folkloric trappings, this is a sober, clear-eyed dissection of an everyday predicament, tenderly described.
THE FARM by Hector Abad
(World Editions £11.99, 244 pp) SET against the backdrop of horrifying political violence in Colombia, this novel follows three middle-aged siblings who must decide what to do with the family farm after their mother’s death.
Pilar, who is menopausal and married with five children, is happy to stay put, while Eva — a serial divorcee — wants to sell up, recounting a terrifying episode where she was attacked by gangsters trying to force her off the land.
Left with the casting vote is the youngest sibling, Antonio, a gay violinist who lives in New York with his husband.
Abad gives each of them airtime in name-tagged segments that alternate throughout the book, which unfolds as a kind of silent dialogue crackling with the dramatic irony of what the narrators will tell us but don’t say to each other.
Despite ever-present terror — we hear how Pilar’s uncle was murdered by a death squad, and that one of her sons was kidnapped by guerrillas — this is a ruminative, delicate tale, vivid with Colombia’s natural beauty as well as its bloodshed.
BRIDGE OF CLAY by Markus Zusak
(Doubleday £18.99, 592 pp) AUSTRALIAN writer Markus Zusak has been writing this novel ever since the global success of his 2005 blockbuster, The Book Thief, which was narrated by Death and followed a nine-year-old girl in Hitler’s Germany.
Here, he’s back on home turf, with a rambling tale of five brothers left to run wild in a Sydney suburb after their mother died of cancer and their father vanished.
The eldest brother, Matthew, narrates, zig-zagging between their rites of passage and historical flashbacks to how their parents bonded over piano-playing once their mother, Penny, fled Eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
With tear-jerking moments, the tangled story ultimately turns on the boys’ attempt to heal past wounds.
But Zusak’s opaque, confusing prose style makes this sludgy reading. The exhausting effect is a bit like listening to someone explaining a long, complicated dream — crystal-clear in their own mind, but hard to picture for anyone else.