LITERARY FICTION
EXPECTATION by Anna Hope (Doubleday £12.99, 352 pp)
IF YOU are in a quandary over what to pack for your holidays, then this effortlessly enjoyable novel about three women in their 30s is a perfect last-minute choice.
Oxford graduate Cate is quietly going mad in Canterbury, looking after her new baby; Hannah, also married, is enduring soul-crushing IVF, while Lissa is still trying to get a foothold as an actress.
Like many a long friendship theirs has been a steady accretion of solidarity, rivalry and boozy camaraderie that comes with flat-sharing in your 20s.
Hope tacks back and forth across the preceding years, allowing the reader intimate access to each woman’s negotiations with sex, jobs, motherhood and each other in ways that highlight that particularly female trait of using the achievements of others as an index for success.
This is a quietly political story that suggests the historic battles for gender equality have left women with nearimpossible burdens of expectation.
But it’s also a marvellously tangy London novel that will have female readers in particular yelping in recognition.
MARILYN AND ME by Ji-min Lee, trans by Chi-Young Kim
(Fourth Estate £12.99, 176 pp) THE Korean War, in which millions of civilians lost their lives, has never had the same place in the public consciousness as the ideologically comparable war in Vietnam.
This short novel by a Korean writer offers some welcome exposure to this allbut-forgotten, mind-shredding nightmare through the story of Alice, a Korean who works for the American military and who, when the story begins, has been given the job as tour translator for Marilyn Monroe, who really did visit American troops still stationed in Korea in 1954.
Alice, whose hair has gone prematurely grey, is forced to remember past horrors when she encounters a U.S. intelligence agent she used to know while working for Marilyn. Bit by bit her guilt-stricken experiences of the war are revealed.
The plotting is convoluted and the prose overwrought, but the unlikely empathy between Alice and Marilyn is nicely conveyed in a raw, emotionally heightened novel about Korea’s largely unstoried legacy of grief.
I AM SOVEREIGN by Nicola Barker
(Heinemann £12.99, 224 pp) NICOLA BARKER is British fiction’s brightest outlier, a word-loving experimentalist whose gleeful bucking of narrative and typography most recently won her the Goldsmiths Prize, for her 2017 dystopian satire H(a)ppy.
Producing that novel so exhausted her she doubted she would ever write again. However, she has channelled her doubts into a self-interrogating comic novella in which Charles, a 40-something teddy bear maker with self-esteem issues, and Avigail, an estate agent, try to sell Charles’s poky cottage in Llandudno to a Chinese mother and daughter.
That’s about it in terms of plot, but the novella itself gets up to all sorts of high jinks, sprouting commentaries on narrative as a sort of cultural con job, with the author in open rebellion with a minor character, and with the reader consistently encouraged to question the value or purpose of what they are reading.
Barker, or the author, suggests the novel is ‘unbelievably trite’ but you could also argue it’s a madly brilliant little book that asks who at any point is in control of what. I loved it.