LITERARY FICTION
THE TIDAL ZONE by Sarah Moss (Granta £12.99)
ADAM has deserved his good fortune; he is a decent man enjoying life as a 40-year-old house-husband, occasionally employed academic and loving father.
But his contentment is shattered when his 15-year-old daughter collapses in PE — her secretly frail heart has stopped.
She is resuscitated and whisked to the High Dependency Unit in the hospital.
Adam is now plunged into a new life, entirely overshadowed by one terrible question — will his daughter’s heart keep beating?
I confess that I was prejudiced against this novel from the outset, because, like the Holocaust, the child in jeopardy is a favourite subject of literary fiction, especially bad literary fiction.
Kill the kid: it’s an easy way to ramp up the emotional intensity without working at it. But here is a book which actually makes the most of its endangered child.
This is a clever, well-constructed, moving, funny and very well-written novel, rooted in domestic reality but able to take on the big themes of mortality and the fragility and preciousness of life. Excellent.
THE ALLEGATIONS by Mark Lawson (Picador £16.99)
FICTION does not get much more contemporary than this: a novel about a famous person accused of historic sexual abuse.
The celebrity is TV historian Ned Marriott, 60, who is being investigated by the police over allegations of sexual abuse when he was a student.
At the same time, Ned’s chum at the University of Middle England, history lecturer Tom Pimm, finds himself the victim of a Kafkaesque witch-hunt, with unnamed and unspecified complaints about his conduct leading him to be invited to take early retirement.
As Mark Lawson says in an afterword, this novel was inspired by his own experience when he resigned from the BBC following allegations of bullying.
With its two protagonists beset by shallow fools and groupthink, this is a book obviously fuelled by deep grievance.
It is a fuel that gives this satire power and energy, with some terrific writing and cracking lines, but it also skews it off balance and keeps it going for far too many pages — 446 of them.
A FIELD GUIDE TO REALITY by Joanna Kavenna - (riverrun £14.99)
ELIADE Jencks is working as a waitress in a cafe in Oxford when she befriends an elderly and eminent philosopher, Professor Solete.
When he dies, he bequeaths her — to the consternation and horror of Oxford’s intellectuals — his great workin-progress, the labour of decades which is thought to contain the Answer to Everything.
The only problem is that the now-dead author stored it in a safe place but didn’t say where that was.
So off Eliade goes on her quest to find Professor Solete’s opus — it takes her on a trip, in the druggy sense, with a series of bizarre and weird encounters of a psychedelically metaphysical nature, featuring, for example, the Universal Chrysanthemum and theories of light and perception.
An offputting sentence but, amazingly enough, A Field Guide To Reality is not only weird but rather wonderful; extremely ambitious, inventive and written with a sure lightness of touch.