> ARRIVALS
A palpable sense of place ignites these recommended new books.
ADelhi Obsession, M.G. Vassanji Munir Aslam Khan, a Canadian writer, is at loose ends, his Scottish wife dead, his books written, when the idea of going to India, his ancestral homeland, takes hold. Soon after he arrives, ensconced in the Delhi Recreational Club, he meets Mohini Singh, a married journalist. The agnostic Muslim and the traditional Hindu click.
Soon Mohini is showing Munir around this ancient city, where a love affair between the two faiths is destined to cause pain, and worse. Vassanji has twice won the Giller Prize. This is his ninth novel and it sparkles. The Wild Boy, Paolo Cognetti At 30, disillusioned and disappointed, the author leaves Milan for a remote valley in the Alps. This quiet memoir takes us to the cabin of wood and stone where Cognetti stays, beginning in April when the snow melts, ending in October when the snow returns, six months of simplicity and survival — mapping, collecting, planting and cooking, even finding two unlikely friends. A book guaranteed to take you out of yourself for a few hours. Lost in the Spanish Quarter, Heddi Goodrich Heddi, the narrator of Heddi Goodrich’s first novel, is an itinerant young American linguist, one of a group of students drawn to the gritty Spanish Quarter in Naples. Here she falls in love with the charismatic Pietro, a geology major. The affair ends disastrously, as we learn from an email exchange years later that punctuates the story. A keenly felt novel of first love, belonging and second chances. Goodrich wrote this novel in Italian and translated this new English edition. The Little Fox of Mayerville, Eric Mathieu, trans. Peter McCambridge Éric Mathieu’s second novel is a comingof-age tale in which our narrator, Émile Claudel, the little fox himself, emerges from the womb with language fully formed, and is soon reciting the words of history’s greatest writers. The evocative setting is Mayerville, pop. 295, in the Lorraine region of France, shortly after its liberation in 1945. The precocious young Émile takes us on his boyhood adventures — seeking the identity of his biological father, being exiled to a boy’s home for misbehaviour, joining a carnival troupe.
Mathieu is a professor at the University of Ottawa. The Reunion, Guillaume Musso, trans. Frank Wynne School reunions are a tried-and-true setting, and this one brings the bonus of being set at an ex-pat school on the glamorous Côte d’Azur. Twentyfive years ago, a student ran away with her philosophy teacher and was never seen again. Now, two alumni – a writer and a politician – who know something about that long-ago disappearance are panicking: As students, they buried a body in the wall in the gym, which is about to make way for a new building.
Musso, a prolific French writer, was born on the French Riviera and brings this storied area to life.