LITERARY FICTION
DJINN PATROL ON THE PURPLE LINE by Deepa Anappara (Chatto £14.99, 352 pp)
BEFORE graduating from the UEA’s prestigious creative writing programme, Deepa Anappara worked as a journalist in India. Her experience has clearly influenced this stand-out debut, which recalls Katherine Boo’s Pulitzer Prize-winning non-fiction account of life in a Mumbai slum, Behind The Beautiful Forevers.
There’s also a resemblance to The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The NightTime as nine-year-old Jai decides to investigate the disappearance of another child from his shantytown.
Accompanied by his two best friends, he searches the smog-choked lanes of the nearby bazaar, which Anappara brings brilliantly to vibrant, chaotic life. Could it be that malevolent djinns are to blame? Or is the danger closer to home?
The amateur detectives and their schemes are utterly winning, effervescing off the page, but the tone gradually darkens as more children disappear, reflecting terrible actual statistics.
Anappara doesn’t pull her punches as events build to a desperately tense final act and a conclusion that, while distressing, is fully earned.
A LONG PETAL OF THE SEA by Isabel Allende (Bloomsbury £16.99, 336 pp)
IT WAS the poet Pablo Neruda who imagined Chile as a ‘long petal’, and Neruda plays a pivotal role here.
In 1939, moved by the desperate plight of Spanish refugees fleeing from Franco, he chartered a ship to bring 2,000 survivors to his native land.
Among them are the heroes of Allende’s magnificent novel, a cardiologist named Victor (the indefatigability of the human heart is a central theme), and Victor’s brother’s lover, pianist Roser.
Marrying for the sake of convenience, they are welcomed into the household of lawyer Felipe Del Solar. But as the couple’s relationship deepens and evolves, Chile’s own convulsions see them once again gravely tested.
Although this is fiction, Allende’s epic is deeply rooted in fact, and often reads like a biography — of her homeland not least. Her characters at times seem secondary to the enormity of world events, but they are brought alive by Allende’s generous imagination and brisk, vivid prose.
MIRROR MIRROR by Paula Byrne (Collins £14.99, 288 pp)
BIOGRAPHER-turned-novelist Paula Byrne has also drawn on real events for this, a kind of fictionalised memoir of Maria Riva, the daughter of Marlene Dietrich.
In Byrne’s book the pair become ‘Kater’ and ‘Madou’ respectively, and while the latter is the most beautiful woman in the world, her child is self-loathing and fat.
Daringly, Byrne also grants the mirror that is Madou’s confidante and companion a voice, and not just any voice, but that of Dietrich’s friend, Noel Coward. It shouldn’t work, but it does: Hollywood, we’re reminded, is after all a throughthe-looking glass world, and Byrne writes authoritatively about its illusions and obscene, glittering excess.
Dietrich’s life provides no shortage of rollercoaster drama: refusing to be wooed by the Nazis, she spent WWII entertaining allied troops, all the while notching up famous lovers. But Madou’s towering narcissism leaves Kater deeply damaged, and the pair’s toxic entanglement sometimes makes this a gruelling — although compelling — read.