LITERARY FICTION
THE GOOD CHILDREN
by Roopa Farooki
(Tinder Press, £16.99, £14.99)
% MOVING back and forth across continents from Pakistan to London to the U.S., flitting between the Forties and present day, and jumping from one character’s mind to another, Pakistaniborn, British-educated Roopa Farooki’s dazzling mosaic of family relationships is funny, wise and almost unbearably moving.
It follows the fortunes of four children of a wealthy Lahore family as each escapes — physically if not emotionally — from the domineering figure of their larger-thanlife mother. Buttoned-up older son Sully becomes a successful psychologist and author in America, and his brother Jakie a doctor in London, where he falls in love with a wild Irishman. One sister, Mae, is the owner of a fashion business in Karachi, and the other, quietly pious and caring Lana, works in a London hospice.
The incremental way in which Farooki develops our understanding of them is quite something to behold. She has the gift of all great novelists — and make no mistake, this is a great, great novel — of making connections, a trick of revisiting an image so the juxtaposition of then and now has devastating force. Above all, she has a love of her characters that makes us love them, too.
Few novels are life-changing; this one just might be. REMEMBER ME LIKE THIS
by Bret Anthony Johnston
(Two Roads, £17.99, £15.99)
% THIS award-winning author’s story of the abduction of an 11-year-old takes up the narrative four years after he goes missing and explores the effect of his disappearance upon his Texas family. How can life possibly go on?
Justin Campbell’s father Eric seeks comfort and oblivion in a once-a-week no-tell motel extramarital tryst. His wife Laura keeps Justin alive by buying and setting aside birthday and Christmas presents ready for the day when he returns and by volunteering for night shifts at a dolphin sanctuary. His younger brother Griff tries to adjust to his position as de facto only child.
Eric’s own father, Cecil, occupies himself with the dwindling poster and leaflet campaign to publicise the child’s loss.
Remember Me Like This is certainly a page-turning read, but more than that it’s a subtle analysis of what the minutiae of ordinary life might be like when people find themselves in an extraordinary situation for which there’s no rulebook.
Johnston’s book puts you authentically in a place where none of us, especially parents, wants to go. VIRGINIA WOOLF IN MANHATTAN
by Maggie Gee
(Telegram, £14.99, £13.49)
% RECENTLY we’ve had a novel (Look Who’s Back) in which Hitler mysteriously returns to life in the present day, and hot on its heels comes Maggie Gee’s novel, where the revenant is the Bloomsbury novelist, who committed suicide four years before the Nazi leader took his own life.
Virginia Woolf turns up when contemporary novelist Angela Lamb is researching the archives in New York prior to speaking at a conference on her in Turkey. Kindly taking the bemused-bymodern-life older writer under her wing, Angela shows her around Manhattan and introduces her to laptops and Wikipedia.
Much fun is had from Virginia’s lack of worldliness, general battiness, and an increasing wilfulness. Things really kick off when they get to Turkey, and Virginia decides that having been given a second go at life, she fancies a fling with a charming male hotel receptionist.
Although never dull, the book suffers somewhat from being a concept stretched a little too thin (at nearly 500 pages) and the readers who enjoy it most will probably be those with some prior knowledge of Woolf and acquaintance with her novels.