LITERARYFICTION
CROOKED SEEDS by Karen Jennings (Holland House £14.99, 200pp) PROPERLY hard-to-like protagonists are rare in contemporary fiction. Three cheers for Deirdre van Deventer, the often ghastly main character of the novel by Jennings whose previous book, The Island, was Booker-longlisted.
Deirdre, who lives in a senior living facility in Cape Town, seems to revel in being as squalid and objectionable as possible. ‘The day Deirdre pays back a debt, that’s a day for miracles,’ laughs a drinker at the bar where she cadges booze. But then the police call: can she explain a gruesome discovery at the home where she and her longvanished brother grew up?
Deirdre is forced into a reckoning with a history she has twisted to suit her own purposes. Jennings asks plenty of difficult questions about entitlement, accountability and the existential condition of white South Africans in this truly excellent portrait of the post-rainbow nation.
THE SPOILED HEART by Sunjeev Sahota (Harvill Secker £18.99, 336pp)
CULTURE wars are hard to translate into fiction, but Sahota makes an impressive stab in this verbose novel about a high-flying career man brought down after a careless exchange at a party.
Nayan Olak, who has devoted his life to union politics, is a sure-fire winner for general secretary in an upcoming election. But a surprise emerges in the form of Megha, a wealthier, younger candidate whose hard-Left politics are diametrically opposed to his own profound belief in workingclass solidarity above all else.
Olak, who 20 years ago lost his wife and young son in a fire, has also embarked on a new relationship with a woman who is not entirely who she seems. And then a smear campaign begins, prompted by Megha’s accusation that Olak assaulted her.
Sahota’s admittedly chewy novel is sometimes too in thrall to the demands of its own thesis, but he skilfully reframes the arc of one man’s downfall through the slippery new lens of modern identity politics. WATER BABY by Chioma Okereke (Quercus £9.99, 416pp) ‘MANY of us set our sights on the mainland, the furthest we can stretch our imaginations before they break,’ says the 19-year-old narrator of this delicately written novel set in Makoko, the trash-crammed slum that floats off mainland Nigeria.
Baby, known by her father’s pet name, ekes out an existence ferrying people across the lagoon to the mainland, just one of several jobs and chores she juggles in order to survive.
Yet nothing stops her looking at the skies and fantasising about her future. When a chance project arises, involving the opportunity to drone map Makoko, the success launches her into precisely that future life that once seemed so impossible.
Okereke tackles many issues — technology, climate change, the clashes between old and new, rich and poor – in a book whose busy plot is becalmed by the lyrical magic of her prose.