LITERARY FICTION
MARLENA by Julie Buntin
(Picador £14.99) CLEVER Cat is smarting from her parents’ divorce; her dad is distant and her mother has upended their lives by relocating to the backwoods of Silver Lake in rural Michigan, which is ‘just a gas station, a church and a sex shop’.
Ripe for rebellion, next-door neighbour Marlena — ‘sly, feline face, all cheekbones and blink’ — seems the answer to all the questions Cat has ever asked.
She’s charismatic, beautiful and wellversed in living life on the bad side. Cat sidles along in her dangerous wake where kissing, drinking and drugs are rites of passage in the fierce, glorious burn of their intense friendship.
But as Marlena heads into ever-darker territory, Cat begins to distance herself: ‘I love this wildness, I crave it. So why, when something in me asks if it’s worth ruining my life over, do I hear No?’
The story is shadowy with damage and destruction, but the prose is luminous.
MISSING FAY by Adam Thorpe
(Cape £16.99) FAY is 14, funny, mouthy and filled with a restless energy that sees her bounding on to the fields that surround her Lincoln housing estate with her beloved dog Pooch, who she hopes to train to be a TV star.
But the irrepressible girl goes missing, and her absence is at the heart of a novel where a vivid ensemble of characters live out their lives without her.
To eco-warrior David she’s the haunting face on a missing poster; to misanthropic Mike, owner of a haunted bookshop, she’s a shoplifter; to Howard, a retired steelworker who survived Kindertransport, she’s a kid he unwittingly scared by the park swings; while to Sheena, the glamorous, garrulous, gloriously warmhearted manager of a children’s clothes shop who offers Fay work experience, she’s brimful of potential.
Thorpe drops clues to Fay’s unresolved fate, but this engaging novel is more about love, loss and the yearning for connection than solving the mystery of her disappearance.
A HISTORY OF RUNNING AWAY by Paula McGrath
(John Murray £16.99) ‘IN WHAT felt like a single moment, there was an impact to her ribs, she was staggering back, knees bent . . . she was on her back, her head was bouncing against the canvas, two, three, four times.’
Jasmine had run away from rural Ireland and landed in London, where everything went to the bad.
Back in Dublin, she attempts to get her life back on track and discovers a passion for boxing, which feels like ‘dancing invisible trigonometry on the canvas’.
It gives her power and some muchneeded control (‘let me worry about getting hurt. It’s my body’) — a quality that is sorely lacking in the interlinked lives that Paula McGrath so insightfully describes in this elegant novel.
There’s a middle-aged gynaecologist whose tenure in an Irish hospital is increasingly fraught, a vulnerable American runaway who heads off with a biker gang, and an unmarried pregnant woman in 1982 Ireland who feels the full weight of family and societal disapproval. Compelling reading.