YOUNG ADULT
HOW NOT TO DISAPPEAR by Clare Furniss (Simon & Schuster £12.99)
FURNISS’s stunning young adult debut, The Year of The Rat, was one of my favourite books of 2014, so i approached this follow-up with nervously high expectations. i need not have worried.
This is a beautifully executed story in which 17-year-old hattie, juggling babysitting her younger siblings for her widowed but soonto-be remarried mother, working in a diner and studying at school, discovers she’s pregnant from a one-night stand with her best friend Reuben, who is spending his summer travelling in France.
When she receives a phone call asking her to visit her dead father’s aunt Gloria, whom no one knew existed and who suffers from dementia, she feels pulled in conflicting directions. But as the relationship between the teenager and elderly relative develops, and Gloria’s tragic but fiercely defiant backstory unfurls, hattie takes control of her own destiny with life-affirming and joyous consequences.
This isn’t the first Ya novel to incorporate dementia as a plot device, but it’s gloriously funny, deeply emotional and a triumph.
ANNA AND THE SWALLOW MAN
by Gavriel Savit
(Bodley Head £9.99)
in KRAKOW, 1939, seven-year-old anna’s widowed father, a university linguistics professor, is called away. he never returns — taken, we understand, by the nazis.
left alone, anna attaches herself to a mysterious, tall stranger whom she calls swallow man, who teaches her swift lessons in survival — she must pose as his daughter and he will call her only sweetie: names themselves can be dangerous in this war.
For years they wander across Poland’s countryside, dodging danger, using their multiple languages, mutually dependent. Who is swallow man and what sadness lies behind the single, embroidered baby shoe he treasures?
as anna grows, she learns harsh truths about conflict and humanity — and ultimately about sacrifice.
This wonderfully original concept, enigmatic in style yet grounded in brutal reality, is written with deceptive power and grace. although it leaves questions hanging long after you turn the last page, this is a debut that promises great books from savit.
MARESI by Maria Turtschaninoff (Pushkin £10.99)
MARESI’s parents sent her to the isolated Red abbey on a remote island to escape the hunger Winter famine that killed her sister. here, in the exclusive company of women, she devours library books, worships the mother Goddess deity and feels safe.
But when silent, secretive fugitive Jai arrives and follows maresi’s every move, the two girls form a special bond. Jai is fleeing the violence of her father, who has sworn to track her down in revenge for her rebellion against his terrifying exertion of power and control — which threatens the abbey’s survival.
This is the first book in a very unusual fantasy/ fairytale trilogy, bristling with feminism, inner darkness and intellectual questions and has been hugely popular in its native Finland.
atmospheric and dark, it should garner devoted fans here, too.