LITERARYFICTION

EARTH by John Boyne (Doubleday £12.99, 176pp)

EARTH, shame and humiliation are inextricably linked in this tale of a gay professional footballer brought low. Not that Evan Keogh, the would-be artist son of an abusive Irish farmer father, enjoys the game — he has as little desire to be on the pitch as he does to be working in the fields. When we meet him, his days as a star player seem numbered as he awaits trial, charged with being an accessory to rape.

This is the second in a quartet of interlinked novels named for the elements and devoted to exploring trauma of various kinds. Here, the results are compelling, if fairly unrelentingly bleak, as we move between the court case and the sordid events that have led to it.

There’s the suggestion of a revenge plot, but the dots are never really joined; what remains is a potent portrait of a flawed young man elevated to the position of hero but mired in the damage of the past.

THE ALTERNATIVES by Caoilinn Hughes (Oneworld £18.99, 352pp)

MEET the Flattery sisters, Irish born and bred, each with a PhD and all wrestling with existential crises. When geologist Maeve, weighed down by her awareness of the Earth’s fate, abruptly abandons her home, her siblings unite to find her.

There’s Nell, a university philosopher who is suffering from an alarming unidentified disease; Rhona, a political scientist with a passionate belief in citizens’ assemblies; and Maeve, a celebrity chef forced to choose between her principles and her career.

The dense blend of score settling, wise-cracking, ideas and eccentricity is nothing if not attention-grabbing, with the middle sections taking the form of a play. It can be a bit exhausting, but Hughes’s commitment to facing the question of how to go onward in our troubled times is admirable.

THE MORNINGSIDE by Tea Obreht

(W&N £20, 304pp)

THE titular tower block is a crumbling edifice on an island that may once have been Manhattan. It’s where 11-year-old Sil and her mother are attempting to make a new life having signed up for a government repopulation programme. Sil’s mother remains tight-lipped about their past, but her Aunt Ena is full of folklore about ‘Back Home’ that ignites Sil’s imagination.

Obreht’s award-winning 2011 novel The Tiger’s Wife evoked the Balkan wars of the 1990s; here, it’s seemingly climate change that has driven the conflict that has turned the book’s protagonists into refugees.

The result is dystopian fiction at its most unnervingly captivating — submerged highways, tree-colonised train tracks, wheeling flocks of urban cranes.

But this is also an increasingly serious look at a future, both unimaginable and all too near at hand, where reasons to be hopeful are hard to come by — and yet where humanity continues to find a way.