LITERARY FICTION

SUMMERWATER by Sarah Moss

(Picador £14.99, 208 pp) CAPTURING era-defining events in fiction is notoriously tricky — 9/11 addled some great writers in the 2000s, and Sarah Moss’s recent work prompts the thought that Brexit might be having a similar effect.

Her kaleidoscopic new novel unfolds over a rainy summer’s day as seen by 12 different residents of a Scottish holiday park, from a mother wondering how best to use a rare hour’s childcare, to a young couple hungrily experimenting between the sheets.

At first, the book seems designed to showcase Moss’s powers of imaginative sympathy, with action less important than sharp social observation. This is until tragedy beckons in the background tensions surrounding the supposedly Eastern European inhabitants of one cabin, relentlessly badmouthed on account of playing music at night.

A new Moss novel is always a gift but, as with her previous book, Ghost Wall, I can’t help feeling that the urge to say something important about the here and now is leading her into melodrama.

HERE IS THE BEEHIVE by Sarah Crossan

(Bloomsbury Circus £12.99, 288 pp) IF THE derisive tag ‘Hampstead adultery novel’ seeks to damn middle-class hankypanky as a tired or otherwise unfit subject for fiction, this stylish adult debut from an award-winning YA author ought to make even the weariest reader think again.

Set in North London, it’s told by Ana, a solicitor and married mother-of-two, who plunges into a heady liaison with Connor, an architect, also married with children, after he visits her office to sort out a will.

The novel’s cut-up prose looks like a poem, which might seem gimmicky but adds pace and punch, while the jumbled timeline fuels intrigue: as Ana narrates in the aftermath of the affair — Connor is dead — the story’s phases blur, from the first stirrings of desire, to stolen weekends away, to pilfering keepsakes from Connor’s widow as Ana riskily befriends her under false pretences.

Sex, work and motherhood all come under the microscope in this vivid portrait of the agony of being ‘the other woman’.

AS YOU WERE by Elaine Feeney

(Harvill Secker £14.99, 400 pp) FEENEY’S dialogue-driven debut follows Sinéad, an Irish property developer who doesn’t want to let her husband and young sons know about her terminal cancer diagnosis, not even when she’s brought to hospital in an ambulance.

We cut between her stubbornly nonmaudlin thoughts and fragmented eavesdropping on the war stories traded by her fellow patients on the ward, whose tragicomic tales make up the bulk of the book and shed alarming light on the history of women’s struggle for reproductive rights in Ireland.

The clever set-up doesn’t come costfree, since it’s hard not to feel twitchy whenever Sinéad isn’t the focus — she’s the novel’s most complex, engaging character, yet we see her only in glimpses, as a secret drinker and love cheat scarred by a tyrannical father.

While Feeney judges her bittersweet tone perfectly, the roundabout narrative structure makes for a frustrating reading experience, even though it’s entirely consistent with the novel’s theme of avoiding hard emotions.