Rules and revenge
A book with motherhood at its hub is tense and compelling.
In a scenario reminiscent of the movie Pleasantville, nomadic art photographer Mia and her teenage daughter Pearl arrive in the ideal, planned community of Shaker Heights and disrupt the Richardson family’s ideal, well-planned life. Feeling the impact most is Richardson matriarch Elena, who has slavishly followed society’s rules and resents that Mia seems to have achieved a fuller life by breaking them. In an act of belated selfactualisation and revenge, Elena investigates Mia’s hidden past, but what she discovers may hurt her own family more. Celeste Ng puts motherhood at the hub of
LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE
($34.99, Hachette) and radiates out from it issues of women’s autonomy over their careers and bodies, as well as race, privilege and the cost of societal expectations on both men and women. The structure is clumsy at times, but the writing is sure and the story tense and compelling. Recommended.
It’s lucky Tom Hazard
doesn’t look his age, because if anyone finds out he’s more than 400 years old, it will make his life even trickier. As it is, he must meet the demands of enigmatic fellow ancient Hendrich, who has promised to find Tom’s missing daughter; avoid falling in love; and teach a class without letting slip he knows more
about history than is usual. HOW TO STOP
TIME ($32.99, A&U Canongate) is pleasantly written, but it’s hard to know what author Matt Haig intended the book to be. The mystery involving Tom’s daughter and Hendrich is slow to gain momentum and its resolution is frankly silly. The presentday love story barely gets off the ground. And we spend too much of the novel in Tom’s past, where he meets an implausible number of famous people, who have all the depth of a waxwork. A good idea, but Haig doesn’t carry it off.
Divorced single mother
Helena is not WAITING FOR MONSIEUR BELLIVIER
($34.99, Hachette), but, on impulse, says she is. She’s escorted to an empty office where she will be well paid for doing nothing but forwarding cryptic emails. Mancebo, shopkeeper and family man in Montmartre, accepts money from the woman across the road to spy on her husband, whom she suspects of having an affair. Both Helena and Mancebo soon find their arrangements are much more complicated than they’d thought, but now they’re stuck, and their lives will change whether they like it or not. What lifts this book is author Britta Röstlund’s ability to meld empathy with cool, astute observation. The characters’ inner conflicts are compassionately, often amusingly, portrayed but Röstlund never lets them off the moral hook. The ending is daft and contrived, but everything that comes before it is most enjoyable.