DEBUT FICTION
IT ALL started when Jerry and his wife, Pen, found a house they could afford and turned it into a dream home.
But they woke up — and when they got divorced they parted from the house as well. Their children turned their backs on it, too, and Walker’s amusing first novel follows the quirky and engaging family on their lives away from home over 30 years.
Jerry makes careers out of advertising and ex-wives, Pen succeeds by writing children’s books and creating a garden, daughter Isobel hides from her own children by playing a computer game in Dubai and son Conrad settles for squalor and bicycles. Their saga comes full circle when it is time to sell the house, in a now gentrified zone of London.
Walker’s writing is lighthearted, occasionally tipping over into being facetious. Whether you are climbing the property ladder or slithering down a snake, it’s an enjoyable romp — unless, of course, you are having a problem with the neighbours, the planners or the plumbing. THE setting of Lundgren’s fascinating novel is a fictitious city somewhere — or perhaps everywhere — in the middle of the United States. In its bewildering mazes of streets and shopping malls, an opera star named Molly has suddenly disappeared after popping out to buy an egg, and her heartbroken husband Sven is in search of her.
As he tells the tale of his investigations we realise that there is more than one mystery in the Kafka-esque landscape.
There are clues, hints and red herrings throughout, from references to European writers and thinkers, to newspaper articles which reveal acrostics spelling out Molly’s name. It may seem challenging, but alongside the erudition and the occasional obscurity the writing is sprightly, amusing and genuinely intriguing.
It’s a detective story, but not as we know them. IN A narrative that spans the whole of the last century, this is the rags-to-riches life of Sam Kandy, making his way against the background of changes in his native island, from the days of British rule over what was then called Ceylon through the granting of independence into a new era as Sri Lanka. It is an ambitious plan for a first British-published novel by the Canadian author, whose parents were Sri Lankan — particularly when the central character is not an attractive hero but a ruthlessly competitive pursuer of power and wealth, capable of crimes including brutal savagery.
On top of that, the reader has to face exotic words which in the first few pages include ‘jaggery’, a kind of sweet, and ‘walauwa’, the mansion of a local aristocratic family. Google and guesswork may help with the unfamiliar vocabulary, geography and history, and some people might actually relish the puzzles.