LATEST TITLES

THE WARDROBE MISTRESS by Patrick McGrath, Hutchinson, £14.99, ebook £9.99 HHHHH

SET in the freezing, fog-bound austerity of London in 1947, we open on the funeral of Charlie ‘Gricey’ Grice, one of the great actors of his day, and pan across our key players – his widow Joan, a theatre wardrobe mistress and his daughter Vera.

Not long after her husband’s death, Joan begins a complicated friendship with Charlie’s understudy, Frank.

Joan starts to tailor Charlie’s clothes for Frank, delving into her husband’s voluminous wardrobe. But as this new intimacy grows, Joan – a Jew – makes the odious discovery that her husband was a fascist sympathiser.

This enthralling novel deftly evokes a powerful sense of place, with period details of austerity and backstage life subtly but credibly sketched in. Sombre in mood and bleak in conclusion, it is a powerfully absorbing story of a woman betrayed in death, as in life.

SMILE by Roddy Doyle, Jonathan Cape, £14.99, ebook £9.99 HHHHH

RODDY Doyle leaves a portion of his trademark humour at the door in this tale of resurfacing childhood trauma and middleage malaise.

After separating from his wife, Victor Forde is back living alone in the neighbourhood where he once went to school – in the 1960s, under the controversial Christian Brothers regime that would years later deliver Ireland one of its darkest abuse scandals.

It is a chance meeting, in his new local, with a man purporting to be an old classmate, that prompts Victor to recall his experiences at the hands of the Brothers.

The progression of the book is not chronological and chapters flit around in time.

Doyle’s skill with dialogue keeps a thread of Irish charm running through the novel, but the overall impression is of a writer trying to do something different. The shock ‘twist’ ending is a bold gamble.