LITERARY FICTION
REDHEAD BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD by Anne Tyler
(Chatto £14.99, 192 pp) HOLD on — wasn’t Anne Tyler going to retire? This is her third outing since 2015’s A Spool Of Blue Thread, supposedly her final novel. But lucky for us that she didn’t keep her word as, right now, a book this lovely feels practically heaven-sent.
Micah is a self-employed IT repairman in Baltimore, coasting along commitment-free in his 40s until his girlfriend gets the hump because he hasn’t asked her to move in — a grievance that only grows when he puts up a student who arrives out of the blue claiming to be his son, against all biological possibility.
So warmly, and with such easy virtuosity, Tyler tells the story in the third person but entirely from Micah’s emotionally perplexed perspective, inviting us to read between the lines to gauge the extent of his unvoiced midlife regret.
Crisp and direct, yet full of subtle touches, it’s a big-hearted tale of roads not taken — a delight from start to finish.
YOU PEOPLE by Nikita Lalwani
(Viking £12.99, 240 pp) LALWANI’S previous novel, The Village, went behind the scenes of a fictitious documentary about an Indian jail full of women whose forced marriages drove them to murder.
Set in London, her new book likewise folds serious social issues into an entertaining plot.
The action takes place in a pizzeria run by Tuli, an enigmatic Tamil from Singapore, who gives work to undocumented migrants while helping them navigate the asylum system.
We cut between two of his workers: Shan, a geologist who left his wife and child in Sri Lanka after his father was murdered by the military; and 19-yearold Nia, from Wales, who — like the reader — gets a crash course in the ills of Britain’s so-called hostile environment for migrants.
As well as making sharp political points, Lalwani keeps things bubbly with side helpings of romance and suspense in a story engineered to demonstrate how the law seldom has much to do with moral rights and wrongs.
HOW MUCH OF THESE HILLS IS GOLD by C. Pam Zhang
(Virago £14.99, 288 pp) CHINESE migration to Gold Rush California was among the themes of Peter Ho Davies’s The Fortunes a few years back.
The subject gets a bolder treatment in this imposing U.S. debut, a mythical Western that upends the racial and gender stereotypes of the genre.
We meet orphaned sisters Lucy and Sam, 12 and 11, on a quest to bury their father, a prospector from China, whose decomposing corpse they lug around while fending off bandits and sexual predators.
As the story cuts back and forth in time, we hear him speak from the afterlife about discovering gold as a boy, and see their mother’s dashed dream of re-crossing the Pacific.
Zhang’s acknowledgements namecheck Michael Ondaatje and Annie Proulx, and, like them, she wields a mercurial prose style — ornate yet clipped, rugged as well as ethereal — that requires the reader to meet her more than halfway.
Finely wrought, yes, but also arid, humourless and ultimately a bit of a slog.