LITERARY FICTION
INLAND by Téa Obreht
(W&N £14.99, 368 pp) AT A time when oldfashioned storytelling seems to be in decline, Téa Obreht is a class apart. She won the Orange Prize with her debut, The Tiger’s Wife, a mythologised take on Yugoslav history, and widens her canvas further with this sophomore novel, set amid the drought-stricken hinterlands of late 19th-century Arizona.
It’s the story of two people: Lurie, an outlaw on the run for killing a boy, and Nora, the indomitable young wife of a local newspaper editor stuck at home after her husband leaves her and their two sons to go in search of water.
Yet this is just the bare bones of a bustling, bravura adventure that’s part Western, part Cormac McCarthy and part Obreht’s unique blend of spiritual realism in which, as her protagonists wrestle with their respective destinies, the voices of the dead are just as loud as those of the living.
This is not a novel to gulp down, but to savour, as Obreht fleshes out every possible detail in language that tastes both of the soil and of the skies.
The final chapter, meanwhile, rich in poignant symbolism, is a wonder.
SAY SAY SAY by Lila Savage
(Serpent’s Tail £9.99, 176 pp) ELLA is nearly 30 and, without really planning it, has established a career as a carer. Nothing prepares her for Jill, however, a 60-year-old woman with a progressive brain injury following a car accident, whose retired husband, Bryn, has hired Ella as a companion.
Ella is in a happy relationship with her girlfriend, Alix, yet can’t help but become interested in Bryn: his smile, his compassion, his unbroken, tormenting love for Jill. But Jill is deteriorating fast and, soon, neither Ella nor Bryn can cope with her rages, her lack of biddability and her stupefied lack of interest in everything around her.
Savage, who has worked as a carer, knows the world of which she speaks.
However, her novel is overwritten, despite containing almost no plot and even less dialogue. Instead, she tells us a lot about how Ella feels, but without ever giving her a persuasive inner life.
Savage strains to explore what it means to be kind, an admirable gesture in a novel — but the whole thing feels effortful, dutiful and, I’m afraid, dull.
DEVOTION by Madeline Stevens
(Faber £12.99, 304 pp) HERE’S another Ella, also an aimless millennial, but, this in New York.time, a nastily impoverished
one barely scraping a living Somehow, she lands a job as nanny to a wealthy Upper East Side couple and is quickly sucked into their life of gilded decadence, secretly privy to Lonnie’s affair with her husband’s best friend and to Lonnie’s private thoughts, written in a journal she hides, oddly, in the freezer.
There are drugs, booze and sexual attraction in all the wrong places, and Ella — who, most of the time, can barely afford to eat — hungers after it all, developing a violent attraction for Lonnie, which she, in turn, carelessly, and only ever playfully, partly reciprocates. Inevitably, it all starts to unravel.
Yet, while this well-written debut has the pulse of a slow-burning thriller, it’s really a claustrophobic study in class and inequality, although you might feel its conclusions — that those born at the bottom will always be on the outside — are hardly a revelation.