LITERARYFICTION
THE HYPOCRITE by Jo Hamya (W&N £18.99, 240 pp)
HAMYA’S Three Rooms, about a young academic after the Brexit vote, was one of the most interesting debuts of recent years.
I like this follow-up even more. It turns on the thorny relationship between a playwright and her novelist father, a faded enfant terrible who finds himself suffering the discomfort of viewing his daughter’s latest production — which dramatises his womanising during her youth, something he hadn’t known she was aware of.
Hamya jolts our sympathies every which way, anatomising the novelist’s churn of emotions as he sits through a matinee as she discusses the play with her mother (his ex-wife) over lunch.
The drama of the story’s intergenerational strife keeps us rapt on its own terms, but also functions as an even-handed cultural satire targeting social media-powered morality in the 21st century.
Written with cool precision as well as barely veiled glee, it confirms Hamya as one of the sharpest new writers around.
WHALE FALL by Elizabeth O’Connor (Picador £14.99, 224 pp)
THIS quietly powerful first novel gives us a familiar coming-of-age scenario in the unfamiliar setting of a unspecified, sparsely populated island off the Welsh coast prior to World War II.
We follow Manod, a young woman whose life is upended by Edward and Joan, researchers arriving from the mainland to investigate local customs.
Bilingual Manod is drafted in to act as their fixer. The job, coming just as her sort-of boyfriend is about to leave for the mainland, widens her horizons at an already fraught time.
In her confusion, she’s attracted to Joan, glamorous, sophisticated and independent — but alert, too, to Edward’s roving eye.
Writing with graceful minimalism — there’s plenty of white space between paragraphs — O’Connor gently pulls together the book’s threads, evoking the mismatch between hidebound locals and fleet-footed incomers whose passing whims exact a heavy emotional toll.
THE LOST LOVE SONGS OF BOYSIE SINGH by Ingrid Persaud (Faber £18.99, 544 pp)
TRINIDAD-BORN, Londonbased writer Persaud won the Costa First Novel award for her debut, Love After Love, an immigrant drama set in the Caribbean and U.S.
Her latest novel centres on a reallife gangster, the titular Boysie Singh, notorious in 20th-century Trinidad and seen here from the point of view of four rival women caught up in a losing battle to stay one step ahead of his ruinously voracious sexual appetites.
Persaud, writing in unglossed vernacular, toggles between their voices in short name-tagged segments.
If you struggle to get your bearings — as I did — the story’s ribald humour and steady pathos buoy you up. Stick with it and the merry-go-round narrative generates genuine shock while making us question how far we’re ever the main character in our own lives.