LITERARY FICTION

ANTHONY CUMMINS

DARKE MATTER by Rick Gekoski

(Constable £16.99, 336 pp) Gekoski’s buoyant new novel revisits James Darke, the cantankerous ex-teacher first seen in 2017’s Darke, where he found late-life solace as a grandfather while mourning the death of his wife after a long illness.

Here, he finds an outlet for his stalled literary ambition by writing a sequel to Gulliver’s Travels as a bedtime story for his grandson, Rudy — a thinly veiled allegory of his own travails as the subject of a police investigation into his wife’s death, after some loose talk from his hated son-in-law, a trainee social worker.

How that storyline plays out, as a euthanasia case sparking a social media furore, might be the novel’s least convincing element. But Darke’s crotchety charm is more than enough to keep us amply entertained all by itself.

As Gekoski says in an endnote explaining why he went back to Darke, he’s good company — a maddeningly hypocritical fusspot who huffs about indulgent 21st-century parenting while letting Rudy fill up on ice cream because he’s terrified of ending up in his bad books.

Gloss over the legal subplot and you’re left with a winningly sweet and sour grumpy-old-man comedy, mixing knockabout gags with heart-swelling tenderness.

HEX by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight

(Bloomsbury Circus £16.99, 224 pp) THIs teasing U.s. novel left me wondering whether its author learned a trick or two from ottessa Moshfegh’s 2016 Booker-shortlisted novel eileen, another tale narrated with bad-ass gusto by a young misfit itchy with longing for another woman.

It follows nell, a Brooklyn-based junior scientist who, axed from research into poisonous plants after the death of a colleague on the job, steals seeds to continue the experiment alone in her apartment.

she’s plotting to win back her glamorous ex-supervisor, Joan, who is the object of a paralysing crush that only deepens when nell’s old boyfriend falls for her as well.

Unfolding in short segments with eccentric titles, the story slips down well, not least on account of the author’s eye-catching turn of phrase. But while you could feast on nell’s kooky quips more or less all day long, the nagging sense grows that most of the novel’s plot threads are dangled as little more than bait to keep you reading.

seductive yet slightly frustrating, what starts as a sinister tale of thwarted obsession fizzles out into a somewhat frothier campus comedy sending up the toxic hierarchies of academic life.