Widower trapped in aristocrat’s silken web
THE SILENCE FACTORY
by Bridget Collins
(The Borough Press £18.99, 384 pp)
EERIE spiders, a strange silk that creates a supernatural hush, an avaricious aristocrat and a bereaved young man are all caught in the web of Collins’s novel.
Weaving historical accuracy with speculative fiction, this is a gloriously grim Gothic tale, where heightened emotion and a menacing atmosphere add a breathless sense of drama. Audiologist Henry, depressed by the death of his beloved wife and yearning for love and recognition, heads to the beleaguered town of Telverton summoned by Sir Edward Ashmore-Percy.
Charismatic Sir Edward is an avid advocate of the mysterious fabric (the origins of which are told in a haunting backstory). Despite warnings, naive Henry falls under the spell of egotistical Sir Edward and the sinister silk — with disastrous consequences.
TIANANMEN SQUARE
by Lai Wen
(Swift Press £20, 528 pp)
WRITTEN under a pseudonym, and timed to coincide with the 35th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square atrocity, this tender, autobiographical coming-of-age tale is overshadowed by a sense of foreboding as history rolls towards the events of 1989.
It starts in a working-class neighbourhood of Beijing, where studious Lai lives with her father, an academic persecuted under Mao’s Cultural Revolution; her brittle mother, who’s desperate to keep up appearances; her exuberant little brother; and her wonderful, roguish grandmother, whose decline into dementia is movingly recounted.
Lai wanders the neighbourhood with her friends, discovers books and boys, then goes to university. There she meets students with revolutionary ideas, which lead them to sacrifice all in their protests against the repressive Chinese authorities. Poignant and powerful.
THE TWO LOVES OF SOPHIE STROM
by Sam Taylor
(Faber £18.99, 400 pp)
VIENNA, Austria, 1933. Brownshirts are on the streets, Hitler’s rise seems unstoppable and one young man’s life is about to be brutally split in two in this intriguing novel of what-ifs and maybes. Thirteen-year-old Max Spiegelman’s parents’ music shop is set on fire. In one version of his life, Max saves his parents, escapes to Paris and joins the Resistance; in the other his parents perish, he adopts an Aryan identity and, as Hans Schatten, becomes a halfhearted Nazi recruit.
Max and Hans haunt each other’s dreams, reflect each other’s actions and fall for the same girl — Sophie Strom, a grey-eyed enigma who darts through the mirrored narrative. But she can’t quite rescue the tale from an unavoidable sense of repetition as their parallel lives play out.