LITERARY FICTION
BROKEN RIVER by J. Robert Lennon (Serpent’s Tail £12.99)
SCULPTOR Karl and his chicklit novelist wife Eleanor move with their 12-year-old daughter Irina from Brooklyn to rural upstate New York in an attempt to save their marriage, removing him from the temptations of metropolitan life that led to a string of affairs.
The house they buy has stood empty for 12 years, tainted after the couple who lived there were brutally murdered — a still-unsolved crime.
While Karl resumes his cheating by having his mistress pay him surreptitious visits, Eleanor and Irina separately and secretly indulge their morbid fascination with the house’s violent history, researching it and posting their findings and speculations on a website.
Then an unfounded supposition put online by Irina attracts the attention of the perpetrators of the killings, resulting in the threat of history repeating itself.
J. Robert Lennon’s tautly constructed blend of literary fiction and thriller is a compelling cocktail, right down to its explosive and shocking ending.
PHONE by Will Self (Viking £18.99)
DR ZACHARY BUSNER, previously encountered in Will Self’s Umbrella and Shark, has entered his dotage, stricken with the confusion of Alzheimer’s. This is not helped by the gift of a mobile phone from his computerhacking, autistic grandson Ben, the words ‘NO CALLER ID’ baffling him as he wanders naked around a Manchester hotel.
But for MI6 agent Jonathan De’Ath, a series of burner phones constitutes an undetectable lifeline to his longtime secret lover, the seemingly happily married tank regiment CO, Colonel Gawain Thomas — a relationship that will finally explode in the violent mayhem of post-war Iraq.
A 600-page doorstop of a novel with no chapters or paragraphs, which zips from the consciousness of one character into that of another mid-sentence, looks a forbidding read, but after a few pages it’s like slipping into a warm, fragrantly scented bath.
Self’s modernist stream-of-consciousness style, a kaleidoscopic tour-de-force of cultural references and wordplay, becomes addictive and compelling. Not to be missed.
STANDARD DEVIATION by Katherine Heiny (4th Estate £12.99)
GRAHAM CAVANAUGH is desperately in love with his stunningly beautiful second wife Audra, but constantly frustrated by her, too.
She’s a motormouth who shares intimate details with strangers in supermarkets, invites people she hardly knows to stay in the couple’s Manhattan apartment and welcomes a ragbag of acquaintances — their son’s dentist or the woman upstairs — to dinner parties.
Her foot is often in her mouth, yet her daffy spontaneity and essential kindness make her impossible not to love. Graham finds her exhausting, especially as they have to cope with an origami-addicted ten-year-old son who has Asperger’s.
When Graham’s first wife re-enters his life, he begins to wonder if he was right to leave her for Audra.
Katherine Heiny’s debut novel is not only one of the funniest books you will ever read, but true and poignant, too. And Audra is one of the most memorable comic characters ever to leap from the pages of a book.