LITERARY FICTION

10:04

by Ben Lerner

(Granta £14.99)

THIS IS a novel by a muchpraised young American novelist about a muchpraised young American novelist who’s writing a novel — this novel, as it happens.

As well as writing a novel about writing this novel, the author/hero finds some success, is given a cushy post as a visiting writer-in-residence and gets a huge advance for the novel about the novel that he’s writing, so let’s hope for his sake that all this really is as autobiographical as it seems to be.

Let’s also hope the health scare in the plot is a flight of fancy. I doubt it is — as the narrator/author notes, this book teeters ‘on the very edge of fiction’.

The novel about the novel became a cliche long, long ago — how remarkable then that (a) an ambitious young writer can still try it as a daringly experimental technique and (b) that this should still be such an impressive and even entertaining book — very well-written and scarily clever.

THE WINTER WAR

by Philip Tier

(Serpent’s Tail £12.99)

THINGS should just be fine and dandy for the Pauls, a prosperously middle-class family from Helskinki — Max, a sociology professor, his wife Katriina, who has a high-up job in the Finnish health system, and their two beautiful grown-up daughters, Helen and Eva.

But fault-lines are beginning to appear in the Pauls’ set-up — feckless Eva has got herself pregnant, Katriina has fallen out of love with Max, and Max himself is sorely tempted by the young and sexy journalist who seems to be taking an unusual interest in him and his work.

Written with unshowy care and thought, this first novel by a young Finnish writer has been compared to Alan Hollinghurst and even John Updike.

The comparisons are extravagant but there’s something Anglo-Americanly, unScandinavianly familiar about the way Tier tackles these domestic and emotional entanglements — only with weird Finnish names, very heavy snowfall and temperatures that reach -20 celsius.

THE LIGHTNING TREE

by Emily Woof

(Faber £12.99)

URSULA and Jerry are two kids from Newcastle destined to be together. At least, that’s what Jerry thinks. ‘Don’t go,’ he pleads at the end of their first conversation. ‘We’ve only just begun’ — one of his many enviably good chat-up lines.

Whether or not his creator agrees with him, though, is debatable, because in this, her second novel, writer-actress Emily Woof does her level best to put huge obstacles in their way.

She also takes care to give them dramatically different backgrounds — Jerry is a working-class boy from the Byker Wall, Ursula from a radical bohemian home in middle-class Jesmond.

And when they leave Newcastle, their lives take dramatically different routes — Jerry goes to Oxford, Ursula to mindbending, life-changing India where she becomes ill but spiritually enlightened in a way that says yes to all the glories of the world but no to a conventional relationship. An unusual but convincing love story that charts the often-distant lives of her two distinctive and appealing characters, written with wit and a lyrical flourish.