Follow your heart
Shrines Of Gaiety ***** by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday, £20) The latest novel from the celebrated author of Life After Life begins with a diverse group of people – “Toffs… happily rubbing shoulders with lamplighters and milkmen” – gathering outside Holloway Prison one morning in 1926.
They’re celebrating the release of one of the best-loved figures in London – Nellie Coker, who runs a string of nightclubs in the city, and has just served six months for breaking licensing laws.
Restored to her grand house in Regent’s Park, Nellie gets down to dealing with the rivals who’ve been plotting to take over her nightclub empire while she’s been inside. But will her six eccentric children help or hinder her schemes?
This novel draws heavily on the real-life story of Kate “Ma” Meyrick, the “Queen of the Nightclubs”, who had a large business empire and family. Her “shrines of gaiety” were hugely popular with a generation letting their hair down after the First World War, but were also widely denounced as hotbeds of drugs and debauchery.
Atkinson captures both the glamour and the seediness of this heady period with consummate skill in a book teeming with memorable characters. Gorgeously vivid, often strange and always very funny, it should cement her reputation as one of our finest novelists.
Jake Kerridge
Our Missing Hearts **** by Celeste Ng (Abacus, £20)
Celeste Ng’s debut Everything I Never Told You was a bestseller, and Little Fires Everywhere was made into a hit TV drama by Reese Witherspoon’s production company. Ng’s third novel is eagerly anticipated and does not disappoint.
Set in the not-toodistant future, it features 12-year-old Bird and his father Ethan living a peaceful if dull existence.
But a sense of threat crackles in the air. Bird has Chinese heritage and a new law designed to protect American culture vilifies anything or anyone with a connection to China. Xenophobia is rife and people of east Asian appearance risk being attacked in the street.
American social services are taking children away from parents who expose them to “dangerous” ideas such as criticising the government or suggesting China isn’t as evil as it’s portrayed.
The laws ban public protest but a group of rebels is dissenting by spray painting giant red hearts on the pavement alongside the phrase “our missing hearts”, representing parents’ love for the children they were separated from.
One day at school, Bird learns that the rebels’ catchphrase comes from a poem written by his mother Margaret, who left when he was nine. When a coded letter arrives from her, he must follow a trail of clues to find her. And he must ultimately decide whether to leave behind the quiet life he led with his father.
Our Missing Hearts deftly weaves a comingof-age story with a threatening vision of a heavily censored future.
Through Margaret’s poems, Ng asks us to consider whether poems are “just words” or have a deeper resonance.