LITERARY FICTION
THE THREE OF US by Ore Agbaje-Williams
(Cape £16.99, 208pp)
SET over the course of a single, increasingly alcohol-soused day, this debut revolves around the entangled lives of a wealthy, unnamed British Nigerian husband and wife, and the latter’s bestie, Temi, whose comic borderline sociopathy increasingly fails to deflect from a rather sad reality.
Each is given a third of the novel, and so we learn how marriage — and now the prospect of parenthood — has driven a wedge between Temi and her best friend, who initially planned together to reject the script of highflying careers and subservient domesticity their parents wrote for them.
As the three characters get deeper under each other’s skins and into each other’s psyches, the tension escalates, until a bottled genie is finally and devastatingly released.
But this is a funny, terrifically entertaining read, too, interested not least in the metrics by which we measure a good life.
THIRST FOR SALT by Madelaine Lucas
(Oneworld £9.99, 336pp) THIS intimate debut charts the course of a formative age-gap love affair set evocatively on the wild coast of Australia’s New South Wales.
Looking back from her late 30s — with its associated waning fertility — our narrator recalls how, in her early 20s as a would-be writer, she fell for Jude, a furniture restorer nearly 20 years older than her.
Solitary Jude is the type of man who leaves a long line of women in his wake — women, our narrator painfully realises, who have domesticated him, but whose existence ensure parts of him remain out of reach.
Her mother, whose own independent streak led her to turn her back on marriage, hopes that the affair will teach them both to love — that they will ‘break each other in’ like horses.
But, as her daughter realises, they might also burn each other up.
In fact, nothing so cataclysmic transpires, in what becomes a poignant exploration of love, need, desire, time and motherhood.
THE GUEST by Emma Cline
(Chatto £18.99, 304pp) THE title of Cline’s novel is ironic: twentysomething drifter Alex, in fact inveigles herself into the lives and stunning Hampton homes of America’s elite crowd, her life a series of confidence tricks.
She is also a prostitute, not that the word is ever used, nor is there a trauma narrative backstory.
Instead, we get the slenderest of plots — having robbed an ex, Alex has taken up with wealthy Simon. But when he tires of her and sends her packing, she is forced to live by her wits until Labor Day, when she deludedly imagines all will be forgiven.
Cline, author of the best-selling The Girls, delivers plenty of scalpel-sharp observations at the same time as insistently drawing attention to the skull beneath the skin: amid the plenty and plushness, Alex is forever fighting giveaway blemishes and sweat stains.
But the agreed reality of the superrich is also a paper-thin construct, no less precarious than Alex’s own fabrications. Drawing the reader inexorably on to the heightened, rug-pulling denouement, this is beach reading at its finest.