LITERARY FICTION
MISSING by Alison Moore (Salt £9.99)
ALISON MOORE’S big break came when her debut, The Lighthouse, about a bumbling Anglo-German hiker affected by a boyhood trauma, deservedly made the Booker shortlist in 2012.
She’s since trademarked a kind of downbeat British realism, full of loneliness and longing, but shot through with sinister doublings and hauntings.
If her subsequent books haven’t always lived up to her debut, Missing is a triumph. It follows Jessie, a 49-yearold translator of foreign novels, living alone in the Borders.
Her second husband has walked out, while her grown-up son from her first marriage won’t answer messages.
Her new lover, Robert, a social worker, doesn’t balk when she says there’s a ghost in her house — a notion explained by steadily more informative flashbacks to an event 30 years previously, when Jessie took care of her niece, Eleanor.
Moore delivers a stealthily absorbing mix of menace and mundanity in a story of how life goes on — or doesn’t — in the wake of tragedy.
MOTHERHOOD by Sheila Heti (Harvill Secker £14.99)
WHEN Canadian author Sheila Heti made her UK debut in 2013 with How Should A Person Be?, critics couldn’t agree on whether its playfully artless account of an indecisive writer named Sheila was ingenious, indulgent, or both.
Her new book — set to be even more divisive — is a diary-like ramble from a writer (this time unnamed) unable to decide whether to try for a baby with her boyfriend as she turns 37.
As she wonders about the symbolism of her dreams and attempts to solve imponderable dilemmas by tossing coins, the narrator’s fear of missing out jostles with the hunch that motherhood is simply a patriarchal ploy to foil female accomplishment.
Given how patronising she is regarding friends with kids, it feels evasive when her ideas of what it means to be ‘free’ are left unexamined by her blizzard of self-scrutiny.
However, think character study, not manifesto, and you’re more likely to appreciate the virtues of this indefinably slippery meditation, which is infuriating and insightful in equal measure.
WHO IS RICH? by Matthew Klam (4th Estate £16.99)
THE travails of an adulterous, middle-aged male may make unpromising (or, at least, well-trodden) terrain for literary fiction, but this riotous debut novel fizzes with enough verve to keep at bay any desire for a moratorium on the subject.
Rich is a cartoonist living in a Maryland suburb with his producer wife Robin and two small children. He once published a prize-winning book, but hasn’t followed it up, and is now forced to service ballooning debts by illustrating an ailing current affairs magazine.
But, every summer, he teaches at a cartooning workshop at the beach — and, this year, he’s out to consummate a text message flirtation with one of the students, Amy, a mother-of-three wedded to a Wall Street financier.
U.S. writer Klam throws everything at the page and it’s the caustic vigour of Rich’s seething monologue — added to the vivid chaos of his pell-mell life — that ultimately keeps you hooked on the over-familiar story he has to tell.