Our friends imagined

JANE AUSTEN AND SHELLEY IN THE GARDEN

Janet Todd

Fentum Press, £9.99

In a Norfolk cottage lives retired academic Fran, accompanied by her imaginary companion Jane Austen, who keeps up a pithy commentary on what’s going on around her. Fran’s closest friend Annie, another former academic, is aware of Austen’s ghostly presence. The two older ladies team up with middle-aged author Rachel, and two former students to retrace the steps of Percy Shelley from Wales to Venice. The experience binds them tightly, and Fran, Annie and Rachel set up home and spend lockdown together, inspired by Shelley’s ideas of a utopian community. Beneath the literary concerns of their conversations emerge themes of friendship, feminism and finding one’s way through life, until a tragedy tugs at their awareness of their mortality. It’s an uneventful, unsensational novel which cultivates a gentle, autumnal mood.

THE HONEY AND THE STING EC Fremantle Penguin, £8.99

It’s 1628 in Oxfordshire. Hester, who was raped and left pregnant by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, is raising her son with her younger sisters, Melis and Hope. Villiers has decided to reclaim the boy, and the sisters flee to Shropshire. When Villiers sends a certain Lieutenant Felton to kill them and bring back the boy, their days are surely numbered. As Fremantle has woven real people into her fiction, history buffs will deduce where the story is going, but otherwise it’s a tense, pacey cat-and-mouse game with the constant threat of discovery set against a rich historical background. Points can be deducted for the sisters’ terrible decisionmaking, but added for the way Melis’s premonitions add a supernatural tinge to an already darkly gothic atmosphere.

KEEPING THE HOUSE

Tice Cin

And Other Stories, £11.99

An exciting new talent debuts in a novel set among north London’s Turkish Cypriot community in the first decade of this century. It features a diverse list of characters, but the focus is on single mother Ayla, her mother Makbule and her teenage daughter Damla. Damla’s father is imprisoned, leaving Ayla with a batch of heroin to shift, which she does, before coming up with an inventive way of importing heroin from Turkey in shipments of cabbages. Damla befriends the more sexually precocious Cemile, a relationship which will be central to her journey through her teenage years. There are other strands too in this mercurial novel, which has a raw energy and inconsistency that can seem careless and undisciplined, but Cin makes a virtue of its unevenness, reflecting the patchwork, organic nature of a dynamic community.