FEAST DAYS

(4th Estate £12.99) EMMA is a ‘trailing spouse’; a childless, literary- minded American woman with an unused degree in cultural anthropology who has followed her husband to Sao Paulo and who now lives a not unpleasurable life of monied languor, dining out with her husband and teaching the occasional English class.

Like her 19th-century namesake Emma Bovary, she is ambivalent about motherhood and possibly sexually involved with her husband’s colleague; yet, with the outsider perspective of the expat, she is also haunted by the widening gap in Brazil between a wealthy elite and a politically restless underclass.

MacKenzie’s novel is driven more by mood than plot, with Emma’s dissociated state of mind a reflection of a broader and potentially cataclysmic disengagement between social and cultural classes.

But for all its smart insight and slick wit, it feels both worthy and derivative.