DEBUT FICTION
BONITA AVENUE by Peter Buwalda (Pushkin Press, £12.99)
PROFESSOR Siem Sigerius is lauded as a maths genius, judo champion, and future Dutch Minister of Education. Married for the second time, he has a son and two stepchildren and presents a picture of a successful paterfamilias.
There are flaws. Sigerius is not as quick as his daughter or her boyfriend to exploit the new age of the internet.
Furthermore, a series of events — including an explosion at a firework factory — succeed in destabilising his seemingly charmed existence.
Fluent and complex, uncompromising and occasionally shocking, Bonita Avenue exposes a domestic dystopia where madness, violence and dark sexuality are seen to be only a hair’s breadth away.
If the impact on the psyche and behaviour of individuals living in a new era is forensi- cally dissected in this multi-prize winning first novel, so, too, are the ancient impulses for revenge and violence.
HALF PLUS SEVEN by Dan Tyte (Parthian, £9.99)
‘A ClUSTERF*** of failed relationships, shot down dreams, hypochondriac breakdowns, parental indifference and bulls*** jobs’, so concludes 29- year- old PR man, Bill McDare, about his life.
To avoid going down, he needs to change. Fast. But getting to ‘up’ will require a quantum shift in his industrial consumption of booze, drugs, sex, and his fondness for indulging in dazzlingly creative lies and an embedded cynicism of epic proportions.
It is at this pivotal moment Bill meets the £10 psychic with a cat.
‘The roads of excess lead to the palace of wisdom,’ wrote the poet William Blake and the author puts his hero on this pathway.
A coming-of-age novel snorting with energy, outrage and scatological detail, it is in places eye-watering. Yet what disarms is Bill’s quasi-religious yearning for order and goodness, plus an outrageous honesty which refuses to compromise.
THE PRISONER’S DILEMMA by Sean Stuart O’Connor (Zero Books, £10.99)
ON A WAVE- WASHED Scottish promontory, the Castle of Beath shelters fabulous treasures plus its half-mad owner, the Earl of Dunbeath. One fatal night in 1745, two brothers set out to rob it.
During the subsequent events the Earl conceives ‘The Prisoner’s Dilemma’ — a game which demonstrates how humans constantly use strategies for dealing with each other.
The Earl then summons the philosopher, David Hume, to the castle in order to explain it to him. Meanwhile, the famed sea captain, Alexis Zweig, and his passenger, the beautiful Sophie Kant, set sail from Prussia with a contraband cargo destined for the Jacobite Earl. love and adventure blend in a story in which knotty philosophical problems also take a starring role. Why do we do good? Why do we cooperate? The answers unravel i n an unusual and exhilarating narrative of sea voyages, grand passion, renegades, struggling philosophers, perfidious English and a coolly calculated killing.