LITERARY FICTION
By STEPHANIE CROSS
GIRLS THEY WRITE SONGS ABOUT by Carlene Bauer (Magpie £16.99, 320 pp)
FRAMED as a cool backward gaze, this is the story of best friends Charlotte, our narrator, and Rose, who meet in the 1990s in New York. Writers in their mid-20s, they’re full of desire, even if they can’t quite articulate what their hunger is for.
Marriage and children are definitely out — but as the years and decades pass, the inevitable accidents and reversals take place, and as the women’s fortunes seesaw, their friendship itself is put to the test.
The conundrums Bauer’s characters must address as they juggle freedom, feminism, love and art are involving, and it’s easy to imagine a Greta Gerwigesque big-screen take. However, the seamlessness and polish of Bauer’s prose left me slightly on the outside, resulting in a novel that absorbs without ever quite fully connecting.
AMY & LAN by Sadie Jones (Chatto & Windus £16.99, 320 pp)
SEVEN- year- old best friends Amy and Lan live an idyllically carefree life on a West Country farm, Frith, that their parents pooled together to buy. It’s 2005 when we first meet them, and over the next five years we follow the intertwined families’ adventures in animal husbandry, barn conversion and B&B proprietorship.
But while the adults are ever alive to the obvious dangers that the countryside presents, they are oblivious to what their children are really up to. Moreover, their own secrets aren’t as well concealed as they like to think.
Jones’s sixth novel opens with portents of high drama to come, but it never really arrives; neither does the sustained satire of back-to-the-earth living that her set-up seems ripe for.
Instead, what we get is a gently episodic and humorous tale whose sharp-eyed, effervescent child narrators entertain but avoid the perils of cutesiness. Beguilingly readable, but rather inconsequential.
THE BEWITCHING by Jill Dawson (Sceptre £20, 320 pp)
SET in the richly atmospheric surrounds of the author’s fenland home, the acclaimed Dawson’s historical latest draws on actual events to close the distance between the witch hunts of the 16th-century and our own era of conspiracy theories, flagrant abuses of power and #MeToo.
Our narrator is thirty-something Martha, loyal and long-time servant of the wealthy Throckmorton family, who is among those present when an accusation of witchcraft is made against local wise-woman Alice Samuel.
But the Throckmorton household itself harbours dark secrets, and as events rapidly escalate, Martha finds herself agonisingly torn between sympathy for Alice’s plight and the desire to explain the ills that afflict the family’s children.
Novels about witches — or, alternatively, women scapegoated, silenced and shunned — have flourished in recent years, but Dawson’s is a cut above and cumulative in its emotional heft, being also an empathic examination of internalised misogyny and shame. And while its uncompromising denouement feels inevitable, a coda flares with reclaimed agency and even joy.