LITERARY FICTION
LOST AND WANTED by Nell Freudenberger
(Viking £14.99, 432 pp) IN THE wake of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, there has been a profusion of novels about rivalrous female friendships, from Zadie Smith’s Swing Time to The Burning Girl by Claire Messud.
Another book in that mould, Nell Freudenberger’s latest, is narrated by Helen, a world-leading physicist who learns that her best friend, Charlie, a TV writer, has died of complications related to lupus.
Yet Helen’s seven-year-old son, Jack, claims to have seen Charlie, and she’s still getting texts from her.
The plot thickens when Charlie’s husband, a good-looking surfer who’s handy in the kitchen, and her eight-yearold daughter move in next door, which sparks high emotion all round — not least in Jack, conceived via an anonymous sperm donor.
Acute about children and grief, this multi-layered narrative tackles a range of meaty subjects — from the age-old conflict between faith and rationalism, to the challenges faced by women in high-flying industries.
Tender, sharply observed and marvellously rich.
THE BEHAVIOUR OF LOVE by Virginia Reeves
(Scribner £14.99, 304 pp) VIRGINIA REEVES was deservedly longlisted for the Man Booker Prize with her 2016 debut, Work Like Any Other, about a black farmhand forced to shoulder the blame for his white boss after a fatal accident in Twenties Alabama.
Her new book, set in the U.S. during the Seventies, tracks the doomed marriage between Ed, a philandering psychiatrist, and Laura, an artist forced to tag along when he lands a new job in another state.
When he gets uncomfortably close to a 16-year-old girl in his care, it’s just the latest in a long line of humiliations for his wife — Ed hasn’t even noticed she’s four months pregnant.
If the story feels well-worn, there’s a left turn when Ed, struck by an aneurysm, finds himself in need of care.
Reeves’s theme — as in her debut — is the limits of forgiveness. She’s a superb writer, moving with crisp, swift strokes over the thorny question of how far people ever change.
THE BOOK OF SCIENCE AND ANTIQUITIES by Thomas Keneally
(Sceptre £20, 336 pp) WHILE Thomas Keneally, best known for Schindler’s Ark, tends to blow hot and cold nowadays, you can still rely on the 83-year-old’s fiction to be vigorous, big-hearted and terrifically direct.
Although his new book may not be his finest, it’s hardly unambitious, taking us into the mind of Shade, an elderly Aboriginal man in Stone Age Australia.
His story alternates with that of Shelby, a dying documentary-maker recalling a film he made about prehistoric human remains dug up in New South Wales in the Seventies.
They’re now held in Australia’s National Museum — in Shelby’s eyes, a colonial wrong he’s keen to correct.
As his late-life memories mingle with the blood-and-bone fantasy narrative of Shade’s tale, the details of each man’s life echo across the millennia.
Yet Keneally risks oversimplifying some big questions, and, while Shelby’s firstperson narration is engaging, the book ultimately stands or falls by its portrait of humanity at the dawn of language.
Audacious, but ever so slightly risible.