LITERARY FICTION
PONTI by Sharlene Teo
(Picador £14.99) TEO’S vivid, disquieting debut is set in sweltering Singapore, where the uncomfortable heat ramps up febrile feelings and emotional fallouts.
Szu is awkward, adolescent and friendless until she meets charismatic classmate Circe, who becomes smitten with Amisa, Szu’s dying mother. This infatuation ‘hovered between a crush and intimidation’.
Amisa is beautiful, with ‘the face of a princess but the heart of an ugly sister’. Embittered, isolated and aggrieved by her failed career — she was the star of a schlocky horror trilogy Ponti! — Amisa now works as a fake psychic medium and is monstrously mean to her only child.
It’s a sparky but sad book, charting faltering mother-daughter relationships and the intensity of teenage friendships, while explaining how past mistakes can creep into a conscience years later.
Teo is especially good at describing the toxic nature of unresolved internal conflicts and how they can eat away at self-esteem, slowly destroying happiness ‘like sarin gas, leaked poison’.
BREAK.UP by Joanna Walsh
(Tuskar Rock Press £12.99) THE narrator of Joanna Walsh’s dreamy philosophical novel is also called Joanna, a woman who, after the break up of a strange love affair, has taken to travelling.
She weaves her way across Europe hopping on trains, wondering about the state of her heart and the nature of her relationship with the unnamed man: ‘We were together In Real Life for hardly more days than a working week, and never the same place twice.’
She’s never had sex with him, but has shared a world of words over email, an intimate digital dialogue that, to her, is full of delight.
But it’s ended and, bereft, she’s packed a few clothes, books, notebooks, pens and a laptop and left London to walk through the streets of European cities, pondering the nature of love, boredom, photography and connection in an age where communication is instant and traces of a shared history are ineradicable.
It’s a smart, intriguing book, but the concentrated examination of the narrator’s mind and heart can be challenging, as is the pace, which is slow.
MY GERMAN BROTHER by Chico Buarque translated by Alison Entrekin
(Picador £14.99) LIKE Break.up, above, singer, composer and poet Chico Buarque’s uneven fifth novel blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction, as he uses strands from his life to tell the story of Ciccio, his irrepressible hero.
Ciccio is a roguish teenager with a fondness for joyriding cars on the roads of Sao Paulo, a love of literature and an overwhelming feeling of existential angst.
Determined to provoke a reaction in his aloof father, he attempts to unravel the mystery hinted at in a note ‘written in German and teeming with capital letters,’ which suggests that he has a secret sibling, born in Nazi Berlin in the early Thirties (inspired by Buarque’s own life).
As the government in Brazil becomes increasingly repressive, Ciccio imagines ‘fantastical fates’ for his unknown brother, while he wanders the dangerous streets where dissidents are shot and people often disappear.
It’s a slightly awkward mix, this marriage of matter-of-factness with the whimsical. The balance is skewed in favour of the unresolved, the unsolved: ‘I prefer to continue seeing my brother in my dreams, his face still unfinished’.