LITERARY FICTION
A THOUSAND MOONS by Sebastian Barry (Faber £18.99, 272 pp) BARRY’S Costa-winning novel Days Without End told the story of Thomas, who flees the Irish famine and ends up fighting in the American Civil War before settling down to raise an orphaned Sioux girl, Winona, with his lover, John.
It’s Winona who narrates this narrower sequel, which unfolds as a whodunnit set on Thomas and John’s tobacco farm in a post-bellum South riven by racial tension. In a double quest for justice, Winona seeks to avenge her rape by an unknown perpetrator as well as a brutal attack on an ex-slave who lives on the farm.
Barry persuasively portrays 19thcentury America as a time of radical flux regarding notions of race, gender and sexuality.
Yet there’s also a whiff of wish fulfilment here, not least in Winona’s clear-eyed, conciliatory view of her adoptive fathers’ role in the violence that wiped out her family — as if she’s engineered to redeem the sins of the West.
NIGHTSHADE by Annalena McAfee (Harvill Secker £16.99, 304 pp) AFTER McAfee’s baggy but big-hearted Scottish independence satire Hame, this pacy tale of marital breakdown on the London art scene is leaner and altogether meaner.
We follow Eve, a 60-year-old painter known for mammoth canvases of poisonous plants, as she roams the city contemplating the ruin of her marriage — and, it turns out, her career — after a fling with her suspiciously helpful young assistant, Luka.
We cut back and forth in time to see how Eve’s former reputation as the muse of a legendary portraitist sparked a damaging feud with her ex-friend, Wanda, now a painfully successful rival.
A victim of sexism who rejects modern feminism, Eve is an engagingly spiky anti-heroine, venting spleen on everything from conceptual art to clean eating.
Ultimately, it’s the caustic tang of her sour world view that sustains our interest when the story falls away in the lurid final third, built around a twist all but visible from outer space.
REST AND BE THANKFUL by Emma Glass (Bloomsbury Circus £12.99, 160 pp) GLASS won plaudits two years ago for Peach, her riskily experimental debut about sexual violence, in which a teenage girl’s literally peach-like body is violated by an anthropomorphised bunch of sausages.
Set over two days, her woozily fragmentary new book follows bonetired Laura, a paediatric nurse (like Glass herself).
We see Laura console a bereaved mother, tip-toe around an ever-soslightly creepy doctor and wipe up vomit when no-one else will.
Home life offers no solace, with a partner who drunkenly attacks her as she settles down on the sofa after a late shift. What’s more, a strange figure keeps appearing in the corner of her vision, as buried grief resurfaces.
Unlike most NHS workers who have written novels, Glass doesn’t shape her first-hand insights into much of a story.
Yet her fleeting, blurry snapshots of a nigh-on impossible job leave a powerful impression, somehow greater than the sum of the book’s parts.