LITERARY FICTION

LOVE MARRIAGE by Monica Ali

(Virago £18.99) MONICA ALI’S first novel in ten years is set in 2016, although Brexit and Trump are of less immediate concern to its central characters than the junior doctors’ strike.

Twentysomething Yasmin is a newly qualified medic, earning her stripes on a London hospital’s geriatric ward. Her fiancé, Joe Sangster, is a doctor, too — and also a patient. Unknown to Yasmin, he’s consulting a therapist in order to rescue their relationship from his reckless risk-taking.

Meanwhile, Joe’s mother, the Primrose Hill-dwelling feminist firebrand Harriet, is getting to know Yasmin’s Bangladeshi parents, with surprising results.

But although the couple appear like an advertisement for romantic matches, all is not what it seems in a novel that examines love in all its guises.

Along the way, this capacious clash-ofcultures tale even finds room for a sly defence of fiction itself. It’s also gloriously readable, acute, funny and sympathetic, as its characters’ eventful journeys see them ultimately forced to reconsider the stories to which they’ve been wedded.

THE COLONY by Audrey Magee (Faber £14.99)

THE year — though it is never stated — is 1979, and at the start of summer two men descend on a tiny island at the edge of Europe. Mr Lloyd is an English painter whose traditional style is out of favour; JP is a French-Algerian linguist studying the decline of the Irish language.

Both men are determined to impose their interpretations on the people and place they have come to record. But the island’s inhabitants have their own ideas about their visitors’ use of them.

The award-nominated Magee’s involving and original novel considers questions of imperialism, ownership, power and exploitation on both a grand scale and an intimate one, obliquely and head-on: puncturing her narrative, and running parallel to it, are brief descriptions of terrorist atrocities on the mainland.

It may sound grim, but there is droll humour, too, and the whole is animated by her characters’ often entertaining back-and-forth.

VIOLETS by Alex Hyde (Granta £12.99)

WORLD War II is nearly over when Violet suffers the loss of unborn twins. And when her husband is deployed to the Pacific Front, Violet determines to leave, too, enrolling in the Auxiliary Territorial Service.

She’s soon en route to Italy and falling under the spell of the charismatic Maggie. But in the summer heat of Naples, there’s another claim on her attention — the baby growing inside her.

This assured debut moves between these two versions of Violet — the one who leaves, and the one who remains, childless, in a small Welsh town.

It would be unforgivable to let on how these narratives finally join up, but Hyde’s ingenious plotting is matched by the inventiveness of her buoyant, verselike, subtly rhyming prose.

There are quibbles: the Welsh Violet’s story is somewhat lacklustre, and Maggie is too quickly tidied away.

However, Hyde’s atmospheric snapshots of Naples — ‘beautiful and bold and filthy and wrecked’ — are excellent.