LITERARY FICTION
THE PATRIOTS by Sana Krasikov (Granta £12.99)
FLORENCE FEIN, an idealistic young Jewish woman, leaves depressed Thirties America for what she imagines will be a life in the utopia of the young Soviet Union. It doesn’t turn out like that, as Florence endures the day-to-day deprivation of life under communism, exacerbated by Russia’s ingrained anti-Semitism.
During the Cold War, she comes under the scrutiny of the KGB, the allpervasive state security service, is forbidden to leave the country and is eventually imprisoned and separated from her son, Julian.
Half a century later, Julian, now living in the U.S., has business in Moscow where he finds himself on the receiving end of state corruption supplemented by capitalistic chicanery.
Sana Krasikov, born in Ukraine but raised in Soviet Georgia and New York, has produced a novel based on a true story that is exhaustively researched and huge in length and themes.
A compelling, richly detailed, terrifying account of life under Stalin’s dictatorship.
FEVER DREAM by Samanta Schweblin (Oneworld £12.99)
A YOUNG woman named Amanda lies dying in a country hospital. Her sole companion is a boy — not her son — named David. He sits with her and fills in the gaps as she tells him the story of how his life was saved by supernatural means, as the spirit of her daughter somehow migrated into his terminally ill body and restored him to health.
Schweblin is an Argentinian-born, award-winning short story writer, and this is her first book to be translated into English. At 150 pages, it’s less a novella than a long short story, but punches far above its weight, combining a dream-like quality with an undertow of dread, hurrying you to its climax.
Combining a ghost story, compassion and parental angst, it defies classification. The sort of book that makes you look under the bed last thing at night and sleep with the light on.
STRONGER THAN SKIN by Stephen May (Sandstone Press £8.99)
CYCLING home from work, eager to see his wife and children, teacher Mark Chadwick turns into his street, sees a police car outside his door and keeps pedalling.
The thing he has dreaded for 20 years has finally happened: something he did as a student at Cambridge has come back to haunt him. He chooses to go on the run, hoping to prove his innocence — but of what the reader isn’t told.
The narrative unspools in two different strands, alternating between Mark’s initially idyllic Cambridge affair with Anne, an older, bohemian married woman, and the present in which, with the aid of a former pupil and his eccentric girlfriend, he evades arrest while desperately seeking the evidence to keep him out of jail.
From the first hook on page four, the reader is held in the grip of a pacy, clever plot which drip-feeds revelations to keep the pages of this literary thriller turning. Excellent stuff.