POPULAR FICTION
QUEENIE MALONE’S PARADISE HOTEL by Ruth Hogan
(Two Roads £14.99, 336pp) THIS tale alternates Tilly’s tricky childhood with her unsatisfactory adult life as Tilda. Her cold-fish mother has died; clearing out her Brighton flat, Tilda finds some diaries. Will they finally reveal what happened to her father, who walked out when Tilly was small?
Hogan explores brilliantly how children and adults cope differently with difficulty. The child Tilly develops fiddly eating habits and makes friends with an imaginary dog; her mother, meanwhile, takes to drink and disastrously withdraws. Only when the two of them move to Queenie’s crazy seaside boarding house, with its cast of jolly Dickens types, can they finally escape their problems. But why can’t the idyll last?
This is full of Hogan’s trademark Technicolor characters; it’s also reminiscent of The Trouble With Goats And Sheep.
IF ONLY I COULD TELL YOU by Hannah Beckerman
(Orion £14.99, 368pp) JeSS hates her sister Lily’s guts because Lily has the perfect job, the perfect husband and the perfect Oxford degree. But most of all she hates her because of a ghastly incident in the late eighties, which remains a mystery until half-way through the novel.
The same incident is linked to the suicide of their father, whose body Jess discovered; their mother Audrey is also dying of cancer. The top layer of this millefeuille of misery is that Jess got the wrong end of the stick about The Incident and someone else altogether is to blame. But by then we’re almost at the end. Is it too late for the sisters to make up before Audrey dies?
If you like extremely emotional novels about fractured families, you’ll love this.
TALENT by Juliet Lapidos
(Borough Press £12.99, 256pp) AnnA is a super-intelligent PhD student who, after years of academic over-achievement, has come to a grinding halt on her thesis. She just can’t find the inspiration and so stays in her expensive flat, subsisting on Pop-Tarts and seeing no one.
On a forced trip to the supermarket she runs into Helen Langley, niece of maverick writer Frederick Langley, whose dazzling career came to a sudden stop because of writer’s block.
Ta-da! The ideal subject for Anna’s thesis, especially if she can gain access to some secret notebooks buried deep in a university archive.
The plot’s a bit cleverclogs and none of the characters is particularly attractive, but I enjoyed the wry take on academia; the visceral competition, the jaded supervisors, the imposing architecture, even the bars.