LITERARY FICTION
OUT OF TOUCH by Haleh Agar
(W&N £14.99, 320 pp) FIVE months after the death of her alcoholic mother, sales assistant Ava is hit by a car. The driver, Sam, is soon bringing her flowers in hospital, but romance isn’t at the forefront of Ava’s mind.
After an estrangement of 20 years, her philandering father has contacted her with a bombshell: he’s dying and wants to meet. Across the pond in Manhattan, Ava’s academic brother, Michael, has received the same request.
But he, too, has other concerns: his Lebanese wife, who is struggling with anxiety after their son’s serious illness, and the attractive artist neighbour on whom he can’t help spying.
Spanning a year, this thoughtful debut tackles both emotional and physical vulnerability while bravely challenging the orthodoxy that we can overcome anything if we only set our minds to it.
It’s a sensitive portrait of the prickly awkwardness of relations in a fractured family that finds a way of combining down-to-earth realism with compassion and hope.
EXCITING TIMES by Naoise Dolan
(W&N £14.99, 288 pp) AFTER leaving Dublin for an English teaching post in Hong Kong, whip-smart but broke twenty-something Ava finds herself in a complicated relationship with a posh young banker called Julian.
They live together and sleep together but are far too ironic to be a couple, even though Ava gets on rather well with Julian’s dad. But when Julian leaves Hong Kong on business, Ava finds herself drawn towards Edith, a glossy, Instagram-addicted lawyer.
Sally Rooney is a fan of this diverting Irish debut and there are obvious points of comparison, as the drifting Ava agonises over unsent texts and how to square what becomes a love triangle.
While this lacks Rooney’s emotional depth and range, it in fairness reaches after neither. Dolan instead provides an effervescent snapshot of millennial, attachment-avoidant dating while weaving in a succession of cracking oneliners and some sharp observations on class, national identity and the oddities of the English language.
LITTLE EYES by Samanta Schweblin
(Oneworld £14.99, 256 pp) TWO-TIME Man Booker International nominee Samanta Schweblin has a considerable cult following, but fans may feel a little disappointed by this rather inconclusive tale.
The ‘little eyes’ of the title are in fact cameras, embedded in a new breed of uncanny cuddly toys, ‘kentukis’.
For the kentuki’s operator, these eyes provide a window onto the world of its owner, who may be on the other side of the globe.
Accordingly, short sections leap frenetically around from Oaxaca to Zagreb and beyond, and while some characters recur, as kidnappings, blackmail plans and freedom bids take shape, there are also discrete vignettes: in one instance, a man in a hospital camp in Sierra Leone momentarily escapes to Hong Kong, where his kentuki is embraced by an ecstatic mosh pit.
This has a propulsive, Dave Eggers-ish readability, but it’s a shame that, for all her invention, Schweblin only ever gestures at larger questions of freedom, privacy and power.