Whisky, women and a philandering jazz musician

368pp, Doubleday, T £14.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £16.99, ebook £9.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ

Who’d be a lothario? The rebukes, the recriminations: is it worth the hassle? American writer Laura Warrell’s whiskysoaked novel (her debut at age 51), a tapestry of female lives connected by philandering jazz trumpeter Circus Palmer, made me feel exhausted for him. For Circus is your textbook commitmentphobe. Cocksure and predatory, he kindles whirlwind romances then abruptly vanishes, and if any women make demands of him, he lashes out with brutal honesty.

Set mostly in Boston in 2013 and narrated in a close third-person, the story was inspired by a difficult relationship Warrell had with a musician, and considers why women “hang on” in such entanglements. Yet this bittersweet study of desire in its many forms doesn’t merely lay into men, but offers a nuanced portrait of the push and pull of relationships. Though Circus made my blood boil, Warrell conveys his appeal: “He was the only man who touched her so indelicately that something animal in her seemed to emerge.”

Drawing her title from a playing instruction by bandleader Jelly Roll Morton, Warrell joins literary greats such as James Baldwin in finding inspiration in jazz, but offers a female-centric take on a traditionally male-dominated world. Even the structure mirrors a jam session, with Circus as the through-line and the women’s individual stories as the solos. Each haunting, self-contained vignette illuminates another facet of love or longing. We’re all the sum of our experiences, and glimpses of Circus’s childhood reveal the damaging imprint on him of paternal neglect.

Likewise, Circus’s selfperception doesn’t reflect reality: he’s still trying to make it at 40, hustling and playing small gigs. When uncomfortable truths explode his self-protective fantasy, “shame hit[s] like the swing of a fist”. Yet while Warrell’s exploration of the heart’s syncopations and the difficulty of finding true connections sounds a plangent minor key, there’s optimism in the coming-of-age of Circus’s engaging daughter Koko.

Warrell’s sentences are sinuous and her characters fully formed, as they perform a dance of seduction and rebuttal, pursuit and withdrawal, yearning and regret. Using an elegant structure with echoes of Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl,

Woman, Other, she weaves a lushly textured tale of real emotional depth, conjuring a world of voices moving in concert.