LITERARY FICTION
LUCY BY THE SEA
by Elizabeth Strout
(Viking £14.99, 304 pp)
STROUT revels in the claustrophobic tension of domestic life, so the pandemic provided the perfect stage for this fourth book starring Lucy Barton and follows on from Strout’s Booker-shortlisted Oh William!
Mourning her beloved dead husband, Lucy has maintained a scratchy friendship with her first, serially unfaithful spouse, William, a scientist who insists she come with him from New York to a rented coastal cottage in Maine when Covid strikes.
The terrible damage from novelist Lucy’s impoverished and abusive childhood is never far from the surface, but now she finds that the whole world is as insecure and disconnected as she is.
As Lucy and William, undergoing his third divorce, tentatively negotiate this unfamiliar world, they forge new friendships and explore long-suppressed pain and secrets, each trying to be more understanding.
It is in the detail — the casual carelessness or small acts of kindness that characterise long relationships — that Strout excels and although this certainly isn’t her finest, it nevertheless has beautifully observed moments.
SHRINES OF GAIETY
by Kate Atkinson
(Doubleday £20, 448 pp)
IT’S Soho, 1926, and nightclub owner Nellie Coker is released from a six-month prison stretch during which her enemies, including bent coppers, have been plotting to seize her empire. Juggling six children, Nellie is never more dangerous than when threatened.
Liberated by a legacy, former librarian and World War I nurse Gwendolen Kelling arrives from York searching for two runaway girls and teams up with decent, disappointed DCI John Frobisher, who’s investigating the unexplained deaths of several young women.
Gwendoline attempts to infiltrate Nellie’s dark and dangerous world, where the matriarch’s eldest, war-veteran son proves an unexpected attraction.
The crime plot is almost incidental to the vivid and atmospheric post-war world Atkinson paints, bristling with toffs and tarts, drink and drugs, heartbreak and humour as a heady cocktail of characters spiral towards a somewhat abrupt ending where, as in real life, not everyone gets their just reward. Highly enjoyable.
OUR MISSING HEARTS
by Celeste Ng
(Little, Brown £20, 352 pp)
THE most terrifying of dystopias are ones so close to reality they feel possible — as in Ng’s latest chilling novel. After years of economic unrest known as the Crisis, America enforces the PACT law (Preserving America Culture and Traditions) that prohibits any dissent, particularly in books, and blames the Chinese/Asian community for the Crisis.
Under PACT, children of suspected ‘un-American’ parents can be removed and rehomed, which is why 12-year-old Bird’s Chinese-American poet mother, Margaret, selflessly left her son and husband three years earlier, after an innocent poem of hers became a rallying cry for protesters.
No one knows where Margaret is, but when Bird receives a coded letter obviously from his mother, he sets out to find her and discovers an underground network of librarians who try to trace the missing children.
A lyrical and touching testimony to maternal love, it’s also a salutary reminder of how easily freedoms can be lost and of the power of words to change lives, clearly inspired by recent American politics.