CLAIRE ALLFREE
SCRAP by Calla Henkel (Sceptre £16.99, 320pp)
FANS of White Lotus might find much that appeals in this screwy black comedy that revels in the fabulously entertaining dysfunction at the heart of the world’s disgustingly wealthy.
Esther Ray is a hardscrabble artist. After her girlfriend dumps her, she takes up an offer from the wincingly rich and mysterious Naomi to collate more than 20 years of family archive material into a set of scrapbooks for Naomi’s husband Bryce to celebrate 25 years of marriage.
Then Naomi dies in a skiing accident and Ray, a true-crime fanatic, becomes convinced the mass of tax receipts and family memorabilia in her barn all point to Bryce being responsible for her death and sets out to prove it.
Her interest kindles into an obsession, which awakens the demons that lie beneath the surface of her own life. The plotting is a bit haywire, but Henkel’s lacerating eye for the morally ambiguous keeps you hooked.
GROW WHERE THEY FALL by Michael Donkor (Fig Tree £16.99, 432pp)
DONKOR revels in the detail of everyday life in this languorous coming-of-age novel, which toggles between 1997 and the present to tell the story of Kwame, a teacher of Ghanaian descent.
As a child, Kwame endures his unhappily relocated parents’ arguments while negotiating his growing feelings for a family cousin. As an adult, openly gay, he teaches English at a secondary school where, as a black teacher in a predominantly white environment, he finds himself at the sharp end of the culture wars.
As Kwame wrestles with universal issues of belonging through a specifically black lens, Donkor both rejects many of the knee-jerk pieties about race while lending his story an easy, conversational intimacy. A novel that glows with the ache of being alive.
SWANNA IN LOVE by Jennifer Belle (Dead Ink Books £10.99, 288 pp)
U.S. AUTHOR Jennifer Belle successfully walks a highwire tightrope in this risky but worthwhile novel, which upends the familiar angsty teenage sexual comingof-age narrative with a reverse Lolita plot twist.
It’s 1982 and 14-year-old Swanna finds her comfortable Upper East Side life thrown into uproar when her mother, in the midst of a divorce, suddenly whisks her and her brother off to an artist colony in Vermont following a whirlwind love affair with an artist.
Worse, because no children are allowed in the colony, Swanna and her brother are expected to sleep in the truck. Rebellious spirited Swanna finds herself manipulating a man she meets at the bowling alley, who is not only older and married but a father of two.
It’s not always easy reading, but Belle brilliantly parses the complexities of transgressive desire from both sides of the coin in this electric novel while lending the precocious, super-smart, highly confident Swanna a fiercely compelling and persuasive voice. What’s more, it’s superbly funny.