LITERARY FICTION
HOW TO BE SOMEBODY ELSE by Miranda Pountney (Jonathan Cape £16.99, 288pp)
THIS Rooney-esque debut follows 38-year-old Dylan, a would-be writer and English expat, as she implodes one version of her life and steps into another. Blowing out her Manhattan ad agency job, she adopts an economical approach to the truth with her devoted, long-distance boyfriend Matt, and finds herself a gig housesitting for an artist. It’s not long before she’s embarked on an affair with her married musician neighbour, Gabe — but what does his wife, Kate, actually know?
There’s not a lot here to distinguish this from the glut of similar novels in the cool coming-of-age vein. But it’s entertaining and sharp enough to keep the pages turning.
HAPPINESS FALLS by Angie Kim (Faber £16.99, 400pp)
THIS is a braiding of linguistic theory with a pandemic-set missing person mystery.
Our narrator is Korean-American graduate student, Mia, whose life is turned upside down when her younger brother, Eugene, returns from a hike distressed and without their father. But there’s a snag — Eugene has both autism and a genetic condition that renders him non-verbal.
As the family frantically try to unlock the truth that only Eugene knows, Mia is drawn into her father’s obsessive research about the relativity of happiness, which throws new light on to both his past actions and his dramatic disappearance.
Kim wears her heart on her sleeve, stressing in an afterword the danger of equating verbal skills with intelligence (and their lack with its absence). And as an emotive portrait of life with a special needs sibling, this feels authentic and compelling.
But it’s a shame that hyperlexic Mia’s maximalist approach to commentary, some heavy retrospective irony and clunky cliff-hangers encumber the endeavour.
PITY by Andrew McMillan (Canongate £14.99, 192pp)
AWARD-WINNING Barnsleyborn poet McMillan writes whereof he knows in this short but memorable debut.
Set in the author’s hometown, it follows three generations of men in the shadow of the pits and their postindustrial replacements — anonymous call centres such as the one where Simon works.
But Simon has side hustles — an OnlyFans account that pays the bills (despite his boyfriend’s reservations) and a subversive drag act that he dreams of turning into art. Dressing up as the hated Maggie Thatcher, he can mine the identity that Thatcher’s Section 28 necessitated he kept hidden as a child.
Meanwhile, academics have descended to extract memories from inhabitants, and Alex’s uncle Brian finds himself obliging.
Interspersed throughout are incantatory sections of prose poem that indelibly summon the reality of life in the mines — the cages, the dust, the suffocating weight of earth and history above — building to a gutpunch of a reveal.
Sensitive, skilful and original, this is a debut to applaud.