DEBUT NOVELS
MY NAME IS LEON by Kit de Waal (Viking £12.99)
LEON is nine and lives with his mother, carol, and baby brother, Jake, in early-Eighties london. When carol spirals into depression and drug dependency, she abandons responsibility for her children. Social services are alerted, and her sons are put into foster care.
Their foster mother, Maureen, is cheerful, large and loving. They have a brief spell of happiness — until Jake is adopted, but leon is left behind. Jake is white and he is not. Then Maureen falls ill.
Believing he’s unwanted by everyone, leon finds a welcome from an eclectic bunch of gardeners at the local allotments, at the same time channelling his anger into his determination to reunite his family.
Told from leon’s point of view, this is the unforgettable story of a boy struggling to belong, and the author captures both his mindset and the period impeccably. Heartbreaking and uplifting — just read it.
HYSTOPIA by David Means (Faber £16.99)
MEANS is one of America’s prize-winning short story writers. His much-anticipated full-length work of fiction is presented as a novel written by a vietnam vet, Eugene Allen, shortly before his suicide, and framed by Allen’s and his editor’s notes, his suicide notes and interviews with friends and family.
it is set in an alternative America, where Kennedy has survived dallas and is in his third term of office, still pursuing the vietnam War. To help the veterans, he has set up Psych corps, a government agency advocating a technique called ‘enfolding’: the re-enactment of a trauma and use of a drug called Tripizoid to induce a form of selective amnesia.
Rake, a vet whose enfolding failed, is on a murderous rampage. He has kidnapped a young woman, Meg, drugged her, made her witness his violence, and is holding her hostage in the woods with his sidekick, Hank, who attempts to save her. But two Psych corps agents are on their tail. Muscular, surreal and complex, Hystopia twists history to examine one of America’s darkest periods.
THE SACRED COMBE by Thomas Maloney (Scribe £14.99)
RECENTLY divorced banker Samuel Browne, 25, is jaded with life. Seeking consolation in Gibbons’ The History of The decline And Fall of The Roman Empire, he finds a job ad hidden between the pages.
As a result, he goes to work for Arnold comberbache, master of combe Hall, who tasks him with finding a missing item of correspondence that his uncle hid in an ‘indeducible location’ in the library.
While he searches through each book, Browne begins to piece together the history of the family. in the wings are Rose, the scarred ward, enigmatic Miss Snyder, housekeeper and amanuensis, and Meaulnes, the brooding gardener.
convoluted and occasionally confusing, but with passages of beautiful descriptive writing, an intriguing gothic mystery unfolds which lays bare the comberbache family secrets.