LITERARY FICTION
WILD HOUSES by Colin Barrett
(Jonathan Cape £16.99, 272 pp)
IRISH writer Barrett won widespread praise for his violent yet tender story collections Young Skins and Homesickness, often about low life in a fictional version of his native County Mayo.
His first novel is a gangster yarn played for low-key laughs without losing sight of the sinister workings of violence.
It begins after small-time crook Cillian unwisely makes an enemy of two feared local toughs, the Ferdias, who seek revenge by kidnapping his teenage brother, Doll.
The action unspools over the three days in which Doll is held hostage at the remote rural home of the Ferdias’ cousin, Dev, a social recluse grieving the loss of his mother.
What follows involves banter as much as bloodshed, but simmering tensions can’t fail to come to the boil, as Barrett deftly hints at the decades of pent-up emotion driving the unsavoury actions of his characters, sympathetic despite themselves. Funny, engrossing, and told with masterful technique.
THE HISTORY OF MY SEXUALITY by Tobi Lakmaker
(Granta £12.99, 192 pp) THIS instantly engaging Dutch debut follows a gender-questioning narrator, Sofie, as she recounts, with fizzing humour, her sexual misadventures as a twentysomething philosophy student.
Roaming the bars and clubs of Amsterdam, she swaps men for women while playing football and learning Russian in the hope of becoming a translator.
Yes, it’s the kind of territory that many writers have mined since Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends, but Lakmaker’s version of millennial coming-of-age romance stands apart for its unmatched ability simply to keep the wisecracks coming.
From the damp squib of losing her virginity to the pain of burying a parent, no subject is out of bounds for the book’s enjoyably zingerpacked candour.
It’s winningly upfront about its own relation to publishing’s notoriously vampiric hunger for confessional fiction. You suspect there’s a lot more to come from Lakmaker — and I can’t wait.
Hats off, too, to the translator, Kristen Gehrman.
BREAKDOWN by Cathy Sweeney
(W&N £16.99, pp 224)
A GRIPPING character study that doubles as gloomy socio-cultural diagnosis, Breakdown is narrated by a middle-aged art teacher who walks out on her family in Dublin to cross the water and hole up in Wales. All the while, texts ping into her phone from her grown-up children asking her to restock the fridge; no wonder she’s angry.
Cue a nervy monologue, airing vast amounts of dirty laundry from her marriage to a high-flying media type who doesn’t pull his weight at home.
The novel’s cut-up chronology keeps us guessing about exactly what she’s up to — a mystery fuelled by teasing references to the quantity of booze she’s been putting away lately.
Sweeney shines a light on the grimy underbelly of family life, in scenes so searing you almost wince to read them. If it’s all a bit predictable, you can’t help but think that this, too, is part of her bracingly sour point.