LITERARY FICTION

WRITERS AND LOVERS by Lily King

(Picador £14.99, 256 pp)

UnInSPIReD title aside, this is really rather delightful. thirtyone-year- old Casey is working as a waitress in Boston, Massachusetts while writing her novel. the same novel that she’s been writing for the past six years.

She’s up to her ears in debt, estranged from her peeping tom father, and in mourning for her free-spirited mum.

Oh, and broken-hearted, having fallen for a philandering poet. But then along comes Silas, a brown-eyed, leather-jacketed writer who knows something about loss. and he isn’t the only interested party: Oscar, a widowed author with two adorable children, fancies himself as a suitor, too.

Writers in fiction are usually embittered or blocked, but one of the pleasures of King’s warm, funny and sharply observed novel is Casey’s grit and passion, undimmed despite it all.

as an inadvertent love triangle develops and the grief Casey keeps under wraps threatens to burst out, the story becomes an affecting, uplifting exploration of the risks and rewards of opening up.

PEW by Catherine Lacey

(Granta £12.99, 224 pp) PItCheD somewhere between Rachel Cusk’s Outline novels and Shirley Jackson’ s celebratedly chilling the Lottery, Lacey’s novel opens in a small, religious town in rural america when a young person is discovered sleeping in a church.

named ‘Pew’ by the locals, this stranger seems to have no family, no history, and no inclination to speak.

Moreover, while some are convinced Pew is a girl, others insist he’s a boy, and no one can agree whether Pew is black or white.

for the devout townspeople, Pew is an unsettling presence, particularly as his (or her) arrival coincides with the annual ‘ forgiveness festival’ — a mysterious ceremony about which we soon have grave misgivings — and the disappearance of a number of people in a neighbouring county.

Lacey, like Cusk, is interested in what we impose and project on to others, as well as the violence of conviction and righteousness.

a cryptic, unsettling tale that rewards attentive unpicking even as it refuses easy answers.