LITERARY FICTION
LUSTER
by Raven Leilani
(Picador £14.99, 240 pp)
THIS debut was a big deal in America last year and hits the UK riding a tsunami of praise. Edie is 23, living in a mouse-ridden flat, floundering in her job in publishing and with a history of ill-judged sexual relationships, when she starts an online flirtation with Eric, an older, married, white man.
Before long, Edie has moved in with Eric, his wife Rebecca and their adopted 12-year-old black daughter, Akila.
Edie sleeps with Eric, has a strangely intimate friendship with Rebecca, strikes up a tentative relationship with Akila and decides she’s happy to take the cash that keeps appearing mysteriously in her room, despite the nature of the transaction being far from clear.
Written in cool prose as brittle as glass, Luster throws down the gauntlet to a politicised contemporary moment eager to see blazingly affirmative stories of black lives in literature.
Instead, Edie is messy, sexually selfabasing, unambitious and, despite her lacerating, mordantly witty observational skills, not much fun. Her voice, though, is unforgettable. More novels like this please.
A CROOKED TREE
by Una Mannion
(Faber £14.99, 336 pp)
A FURIOUS mother abandons her 12-year-old daughter, Ellen, at night on a Philadelphia mountain road as punishment, leaving her to make it back home alone. The daughter does, but not before a man with long white hair offers to give her a lift and then tries to trap her in the car.
Una Mannion’s excellently creepy novel begins in classic psychological noir style but soon broadens into a far richer portrait of Reagan-era America and its cultural bogeymen, thanks to the fearful world view of its narrator, 14-year-old Libby, who becomes fixated on keeping her little sister Ellen safe.
Her older sister is leaving for the city, her mother, never very maternal, is more distracted than usual; she hasn’t got over the death of her Irish father, and then there’s Wilson, the reckless, drug-dealing local school drop-out who is keen to track the man down.
A lushly atmospheric coming-of-age novel in which Libby’s splintering family seems to stand as a metaphor for America itself.
MRS DEATH MISSES DEATH
by Salena Godden
(Canongate £14.99, 320pp)
A BBC documentary was made about the writing of this debut by poet and activist Salena Godden which, if nothing else, has an arresting premise.
When Wolf, an alcoholic writer, buys a secondhand desk, its former owner, Death, suddenly materialises. Death is not the grim reaper of legends but an extremely tired, black, working-class woman who has been terminating lives since the beginning of time.
So Wolf decides to write her memoir. What follows is a mish-mash of history, poetry, feminism, racial politics and oral storytelling techniques as Wolf encounters the stories of Jack the Ripper victims, murdered hitchhikers, suicides and dead musicians, alongside that of his own mum, killed with many others after fire ripped through a block of flats.
Godden’s free association approach is a defining, animating force but also serves as a fig leaf for a sloppy book.