Brilliant tale of a bad, bitter bully
THE FINAL HOURS OF MURIEL HINCHCLIFFE MBE by Claire Parkin (Macmillan £16.99, 320pp)
RUTH and Muriel have known each other all their lives — literally, they were born 15 seconds apart in the same maternity ward. Muriel has always been a toxic bully, and especially vile to Ruth — she even stole her husband.
Ruth has never known how to stand up for herself and always apologises first, despite never being the perpetrator. Muriel’s dreadful attitude and bad behaviour have combined to alienate everyone else over the years and now, in their 70s, they live together, with Ruth caring full-time for the wheelchair-bound, even more bitter and twisted Muriel.
Everything changes when Muriel announces one evening that she is going to die in 72 hours, and the psychological warfare between the pair steps up.
In parallel, we learn more about the backstory of their relationship.
The characterisation is spot-on and the deeper we get into this beautifully drawn portrait of their intensely complicated, often horrific ‘friendship’, the more shocking and compelling the narrative is. I raced through it. Fabulous.
MARTYR!
by Kaveh Akbar (Picador £16.99, 352pp)
WRITER Cyrus is 27 and newly sober, attending AA meetings and working on his programme of recovery with a sponsor. But once he’s not blurring reality with drugs and alcohol, our protagonist struggles to live in the now.
He feels awash in time, stuck between birth and death and unable to experience the present. He is also struggling to make sense of his identity, feeling neither properly American nor Iranian, gay nor straight, neither drunk nor sober.
Cyrus was a baby when his mother died — her plane was shot down in the Persian Gulf — and he has spent his whole life thinking about how meaningless her death was.
Seeking both the meaning of life and death, Cyrus decides to write a book about martyrdom. He meets an artist with terminal cancer, who is spending her last days as part of an installation at a museum, and they embark on big, beautiful conversations. I haven’t stopped thinking about it. Sensational.
I’M F*CKING AMAZING by Anoushka Warden (Trapeze £20, 352pp)
I’M NO prude, but I’m also not a big fan of people who talk about sex all the time — I find it immature and irritating. Our unnamed female protagonist here speaks of little else and although the non-stop references to her vagina and its many needs jarred at first, I did warm to her conversational style.
When we meet her, she is approaching 30 and has been married for a couple of years to a man she adores. But the more time she spends with her husband, the more painful she finds sex with him.
In fact, it hurts so much she seeks medical help, but nothing works. The less physical intimacy they have, the worse their often-scary fights become and they break up on their fifth anniversary.
Part two focuses on her next major relationship, with an older man, in which she continues to explore whether lust and long-term love can co-exist. Definitely different.