LITERARY FICTION
HE IS MINE AND I HAVE NO OTHER by Rebecca O’Connor (Canongate £12.99) SET in a small-town parish in Nineties Ireland, this menacing debut is told by 15-year-old Lani, who spots a boy, Leon, repeatedly passing her home on his way to and from the cemetery after dark.
Soon, they’re kissing at a school disco, distracting Lani from her revulsion that her mother is newly pregnant at 44.
Yet there are creepy signs that this isn’t your average story of girl-meets-boy — not least when Leon lets slip that he’s been spying on her through her bedroom window.
Lani is torn between fear and hunger for experience, with her desires put into scandalous historical perspective by a subplot about a local industrial school run by nuns who incarcerated the children of unmarried mothers.
But, when a shocking climax shifts focus from Lani to Leon — unearthing more buried violence — the voltage generated by the sudden change of tack is offset by a feeling that O’Connor couldn’t quite decide which of these stories she most wanted to tell.
FALLING SHORT by Lex Coulton (John Murray £14.99) LEX COULTON’S debut is a vastly enjoyable twohander that smuggles a sober exploration of grief and regret under a classroom comedy that follows two shambling, winesozzled teachers, Frances and Jackson.
Still mourning her father, apparently lost at sea when she was a girl, 38-yearold Frances lurches between one-night stands, while her friends’ Facebook updates are ‘full of photos of children who are almost ready to start secondary school’.
She’s tiptoeing around her latest ill-advised conquest, Jackson, her Withnail-ish colleague and best friend, who — notorious for flirting with sixthform girls — hides a past involving sexual disgrace in his native South Africa.
With late revelations and delayed flashbacks, the mechanisms advancing the story are creaky.
Yet, if the destination of this warm and witty novel doesn’t quite live up to the fun on offer along the way, Coulton’s central duo remain sparkling company and her school scenes are A*-worthy.
ALL THE LIVES WE NEVER LIVED by Anuradha Roy (MacLehose £16.99) ROY’S previous novel, Sleeping On Jupiter, about misogyny in modern India, beat names such as Kazuo Ishiguro and Jonathan Franzen to a spot on the 2015 Booker longlist.
Her latest novel unfolds as Myshkin, an Indian horticulturalist, recalls his boyhood in the Himalayan foothills during World War II, the twilight of the Raj.
Uppermost in Myshkin’s thoughts is his abandonment by his artistically inclined mother, Gayatri, who was inspired by the arrival of a German painter, Walter Spies, to ditch her husband, a nationalist whose tub-thumping for independence doesn’t stretch to acknowledging hers.
While it can be tricky to gauge the impact of Roy’s toying with history (Spies, a real-life figure who died a prisoner of war, never visited India), the late introduction of Gayatri’s voice — after Myshkin finds a cache of her old letters — puts real zest into this wistful tale of wartime collateral damage, both continental and intimate in scale.