LITERARY FICTION
WHITE TEARS by Hari Kunzru (Hamish Hamilton £14.99) THIS could easily have been an Ali G-style satire: Two white American college kids obsessed with the blues find themselves in possession of a recording that sends the internet into a frenzy.
But Kunzru — a former music journalist who was named as one of Granta’s best young British novelists in 2003 — soon starts to take his fifth novel in a different direction. It becomes clear that the hapless duo are out of their depth, and after trust fund hipster Carter is left for dead in the wake of a savage attack, the skilfully controlled atmosphere of growing creepiness descends into horror.
Kunzru has clearly had fun with the traditions of the ghost story. Like all the best ones, White Tears serves up stories within stories, monomania and ill-advised quests that give off a whiff of sulphur.
It whips along, even as reality itself seems to come unmoored, but at its heart is a serious reminder of how history too often robs the powerless of their voices.
RESERVOIR 13 by Jon McGregor (4th Estate £14.99) AWARD- WINNING Jon McGregor defies expectations with this superbly crafted and mesmerisingly atmospheric portrait of an unnamed Yorkshire village.
It begins like a thriller, with the disappearance of a 13-year-old girl. We, like the locals, expect the worse, but the police can find nothing to go on.
And while the shadow cast by the mystery never entirely lifts, normal life resumes.
McGregor’s first novel spanned a single day; here, a whole year passes in the course of the first chapter. The dark secrets and private sorrows of the locals are charted, time-lapse style, over the course of the next decade, and the collective consciousness of the village compellingly eavesdropped upon.
Meanwhile, the changing seasons, far from being a mere decorative backdrop, are a central part of the narrative’s distinctive warp and weft.
Unsentimental and occasionally very funny, this is a haunting, beautiful book.
SILVER & SALT by Elanor Dymott (Jonathan Cape £14.99) IN THE Sixties, Max ‘The Face’ Hollingbourne is the photographer of choice for stars from Barbara Hepworth to Audrey Hepburn. But his dedication to his art comes at a cost: his wife’s sanity crumbles and his sensitive younger daughter, Ruthie, is deeply scarred.
Some decades on at the family’s seaside villa in Greece, a tragedy occurs, and Dymott’s novel is concerned with unravelling the backstory to this.
Silver & Salt juxtaposes the precise mechanics of the photographic process with the fluidity of memory to great effect. Dymott’s first novel was the highly praised Every Contact Leaves A Trace, and here, too, she skilfully suggests how people — not just pictures — are all too susceptible to atmospheric conditions.
Moving between past and present, Greece and the Hollingbournes’ rambling English country house, it culminates in a daring and indelible denouement.