LITERARY FICTION
BIRD SUMMONS by Leila Aboulela
(W&N £16.99, 304 pp) THE experience of women navigating cultural differences has been a regular theme for Leila Aboulela, who grew up in Khartoum and has lived in Aberdeen for nearly 30 years.
Her latest book follows a road trip through the Highlands in search of the grave of Lady Evelyn Cobbold, a real-life Scottish noble raised in colonial Africa, who converted to Islam.
Along for the ride are three pals: Iman, three times married, from Syria; Moni, who normally looks after her disabled son while her husband works in Saudi Arabia; and Salma, happily wed, yet riskily renewing contact with an old flame who has a shocking tale from life as a doctor in Egypt.
Intercut with the women’s tender, but unsentimental, conversation is a more mystical strand, involving a bird that tells the women stories from the Koran and from Celtic mythology.
Rooted in everyday experience without forsaking the spiritual, it’s a counterpoint to lurid headlines about British Muslims, told in effortlessly enjoyable style.
MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE by Siri Hustvedt
(Sceptre £18.99, 336 pp) APPALLED by Donald Trump’s rise to power, an author, strongly resembling Siri Hustvedt herself, sits down to recall 1978, the year she left her Minnesota hometown to try life as a writer in New York.
That’s more or less the premise of this novel, a scattershot collage of excerpts from the diary her narrator kept, as well as the book she tried to write, and the rants of her troubled neighbour — she transcribed the muttering through her apartment wall.
While her memories of nightclubs and poetry readings are partly a way to resurrect youthful hope amid the disillusionment she feels now, she’s also looking anew at the shocking behaviour she put up with from would-be lovers.
As the brainy tale of a writer’s sexual and intellectual formation, it’s always interesting, if sometimes windy, in style.
There’s a strong whiff of Hustvedt getting her digs in first, with remarks about ‘irritable readers’ objecting to narrative experiment.
THE PARADE by Dave Eggers
(Hamish Hamilton £14.99, 192 pp) U.S. WRITER Dave Eggers has long since given up the postmodern pyrotechnics of his 2000 debut, the memoir A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, in favour of consciousnessraising political parables.
On form, as in 2013’s dystopia The Circle, he’s superb, yet he can feel increasingly preachy — a pitfall his slimline new novel doesn’t entirely sidestep.
Two contractors, known to each other only as Nine and Four for security reasons, have arrived in an unspecified foreign country in order to pave a new north-south highway in the wake of a war they know nothing about.
Nine is keen to sample the nightlife, but Four just wants to get on with the job, which proves impossible when he finds he can no longer ignore the bloody history of his new workplace.
Even sub-par Eggers warrants your time, but I can’t help feeling that this too-neat morality tale, bleached of specifics a la Kafka, is just a bit smug.