DEBUTS

FANNY BLAKE

THE BRAID by Laetitia Colombani (Picador £12.99, 224 pp)

froM India to Sicily to Canada, the fates of three very different women are plaited together in this elegant and engaging novel. Smita, an Indian untouchable, dreams of a better life for her six-year-old daughter Lalita. when her husband refuses to risk escaping from their village, Smita takes Lalita’s future into her own hands.

In Palermo, Giulia takes charge of the family business, which washes, bleaches and dyes hair for wig-makers. But can she save it from the financial mess her father has left it in?

Diagnosed with cancer, Sarah, a top-flight lawyer who puts her work before everything else, realises that her perfectly curated life is now under serious threat.

what stood out for me was the colour and authenticity the author gives to each character’s background as they face lifechanging challenges and search for the courage to confront and overcome them.

THE GHOST FACTORY by Jenny McCartney

(4th Estate £12.99, 272 pp) In the late 20th century, the troubles turned Belfast into the ghost factory of the title.

After the sudden death of his father, Jacky loses his way in life. when severe reprisals are taken after his 20 st friend titch steals a packet of Jaffa Cakes, Jacky decides he has to leave northern Ireland to find a better life.

London offers him a new job and a new love, but he can’t escape the past — its hand stretches out to draw him back home to settle old scores.

friendship, loyalty, love and retribution are the stuff of this violent but emotional and touching novel with a cautionary sting in the tail. Jacky is a well-rounded character, torn between his future and what has gone before. he is given an authentic, engaging voice which pulls in the reader, with welljudged flashes of humour.

MAKE ME A CITY by Jonathan Carr

(Scribe £16.99, 512 pp) Between 1800 and the end of that century, Chicago grew from a single settlement on a site by Lake Michigan — known as echicagou — to an astounding city which hosted a world fair and became the trading hub for America’s gigantic agricultural production.

this novel tells that story in a series of fragmentary episodes from the lives and loves of assorted individual Chicagoans — a native American boy, a frenchman, a storeholder, a land speculator, a couple of doctors, the city’s first schoolmarm and a family of Irish immigrants.

there is much of the panache of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas here: it is an epic story that sweeps the reader from a single log- house to a mass of steel- frame skyscrapers. It moves from bloody tragedy to financial skulduggery and farce, all through a subtle variety of narrative voices and perspectives.

A notably rich, rewarding read.