LITERARY FICTION
THE WANDERERS by Tim Pears
(Bloomsbury £16.99) THIS is the second volume in Tim Pears’s West Country Trilogy, but it more than succeeds in standing alone. We pick up the story in 1912, with 13-yearold hero Leo enduring banishment from his childhood home and the company of 14-year-old heroine Lottie.
With only his white colt for company, a beast to which he is devoted, Leo travels across Exmoor and beyond, falling in with various colourful types.
Meanwhile, estate-owner’s daughter Lottie chafes against the injustice of her friend’s exile, while cultivating the most unladylike interests.
One of the most striking things about Pears’s episodic tale is that Leo, an unpromisingly passive and largely silent character, ends up being so compelling an enigma; a still point in a novel loud with brilliantly captured voices and vividly drawn characters.
Moreover, while Leo’s direction is subject to the vagaries of chance, Pears’s novel itself never seems baggy or aimless.
Occasionally recalling Jon McGregor’s acclaimed Reservoir 13 in its attentiveness to the natural world, this is a lyrical journey worth undertaking.
TURNING FOR HOME by Barney Norris
(Doubleday £14.99) ALTHOUGH taking place over the course of a single spring day, this is a novel of two halves. Chapters alternate between widower Robert — now retired, but once involved in the highly delicate, secrecy-shrouded early days of the Northern Irish peace process — and his 25-year-old granddaughter.
Kate’s life has been derailed, first by a terrible accident and then by years of anorexia.
As Robert’s family gather around him to celebrate his birthday, the troubled past is stirred up — for Robert when he is called upon by an old contact, and for Kate as she struggles to face her estranged mother.
The acclaimed Norris’s two narratives are held together more by theme than plot — not least the difficulties and dangers of communication.
Kate’s illness is depicted in harrowing, utterly convincing detail and, at times, the sense of loss is overwhelming.
But this sombre novel ultimately turns into a profound and elegiac mediation on the possibility of salvaging both meaning and love, even when confronted with overwhelming odds.
THE TWELVE-MILE STRAIGHT by Eleanor Henderson
(4th Estate £14.99) ON A SUMMER’S night in 1930 in Cotton County, Georgia, two babies are born: one a dark-skinned boy, one a girl as ‘pink as a piglet’. Could they be brother and sister?
Their ‘mother’, sharecropper’s daughter Elma Jesup, knows the truth, but her refusal to speak sees field hand Genus Jackson accused of rape and lynched by Elma’s fiance.
Her friend, housekeeper Nan, also knows the secret of the Gemini Twins’ parentage, but her silence is guaranteed — her tongue was cut out by her mother.
This, as you might have gathered, is a book full of stomach-turning Jim Crow-era brutality. It is also huge — more than 500 pages. But Eleanor Henderson is a novelist who is clearly suited to the expansive mode, and her labyrinthine plot never wants for twists and turns.
Nuanced and compassionate, hers is a sweeping tale of uncompromising brutality, which is finally offset by a faint, but hugely welcome, glimmer of light.