LITERARY FICTION
INSIDE THE O’BRIENS
by Lisa Genova
(Simon & Schuster £18.99)
LISA GENOVA is the author of Still Alice, a novel about a woman with dementia recently made into an oscar-winning film.
You can’t help but suspect Genova has hit upon a formula, since Inside The o’Briens is also about the crippling effects on a family of an incurable neurological disease.
when Joe, a Boston cop of Irish descent, is diagnosed with Huntington’s in his 50s, he learns there is a 50 per cent chance each of his four grown-up children will contract the disease as well.
worse, his eldest son JJ has just conceived with his wife after years of trying, meaning that if JJ is diagnosed as gene positive, the 50 per cent risk also passes on to his unborn child.
As the close-knit family reel from this triple whammy of disaster, Genova focuses in particular on Katie, the youngest daughter who has always lived in the shadow of her sister, a talented ballerina, and who wrestles with the emotional dilemma of whether it is better to know if she will inherit the disease, or whether it is better to live without knowing.
Genova writes cleanly and efficiently about the issues, but some readers might find the persistent whiff of mawkish sentiment overwhelming.
LAST NIGHT ON EARTH
by Kevin Maher
(Little Brown £14.99)
KEVIN MAHER’S rambunctious second novel starts with a rush of life, literally: its first pages are narrated from the point of view of a baby being born. It’s an exhilarating and ironic beginning since the baby, Bonnie, suffers a problematic birth and doesn’t speak for the next three years, a trauma that gradually breaks the marriage of her parents, Irishborn Jay and his American wife Shauna.
Shauna turns to the comfort of her psychotherapist, while Jay, a fledgling film maker working on a documentary about the Millennium Dome, tries desperately — and haplessly — to put things right.
Maher’s novel is less interested in plot than in the careening thrust of individual voices and reading this clamorous, highly digressive novel, set in the London media world of the late 1990s, can sometimes feel like being stuck in a very noisy pub.
Yet the extraordinary love Jay feels for his daughter Bonnie tethers the story, and as Jay gets further mired in disaster, it’s not so much the clock ticking down to Millennium Eve that builds the momentum but the question of whether Jay will be able to remake his family.
WE THAT ARE LEFT
by Clare Clark
(Harvill Secker £16.99)
SOME novels are like languishing in an exquisitely scented bath. This is one of them. The Melville family live in a stately faux castle in the new Forest and enjoy every privilege known to the English aristocracy — before world war I breaks out and takes from them the eldest son, Theo.
The loss quickly exposes various faultlines: the mouldering state of the Melville marriage, the equally mouldering state of the house, and the sharp differences between the remaining two daughters: Phyllis, determined to defy social convention and carve out a career as an archaeologist, and Jessica, who dreams only of young men and champagne.
And then there is oscar, the penniless boy effectively adopted by the family who is also a promising physicist with a place at Cambridge.
As the gilded lives of these characters intersect with an exhausted, griefstricken England in the aftermath of the war, Clark expertly spins a story of three people trying to work out who they are amid the wreckage of the old social certainties. Acute and perceptive, Clark’s prose glints like one of Lady Melville’s jewelled necklaces as she builds an absorbing portrait of a society on the brink of modernity.