I’m kicking off April’s paperback preview with two favourites from last year beginning with Sarah Leipciger’s Moon Road, the story of a missing girl and her parents, now divorced, who receive news decades after she disappeared. Yannick persuades Kathleen to travel to Vancouver, where Una had been living, to talk to the police. Although we discover what happened to Una, Leipciger’s novel is about her parents rather than her, portraying the upending of their lives by a loss that’s never been resolved with touching compassion and tenderness. Her writing is as striking as I remembered from her previous novels, glorious descriptions of the natural world shining out from elegantly pared back prose reminding me of her debut, The Mountain Can Wait.
Orla Mackey’s debut, Mouthing tells the story of Ballygowan over several generations in a vivid vernacular, much of it threaded through with an enjoyably dark humour. Characters are not short of opinions about their fellow villagers, some sharp-tongued and judgemental, others more forgiving. I thoroughly enjoyed this cleverly constructed debut, written with a pleasingly acerbic wit and a sharp eye for human nature balanced with compassion, which reminded me of Robert Seethaler’s The Field.
I loved Kevin Barry’s short story collection, That Old Country Music, but have yet to read one of his novels. His latest, The Heart in Winter, is set in the 1890s American West, opening in the town of Butte, Montana whose inhabitants have grown rich on copper mining and are running rampant on the proceeds. When a debauched balladeer falls hard for the new bride of a devout mine boss and she for him, they head out west with a company of Cornish gunmen hot on their trail. Very much like the sound of that and Cathy’s review has whetted my appetite further.
I’m in two minds about this one not being much of a comic novel fan but Richard Ayoade is so funny I can’t resist it. The Unfinished Harauld Hughes sees Ayoade stumble upon a copy of Hughes’s The Two-Hander Trilogy in a second-hand bookshop, startled to find the author’s photograph looks just like him and transfixed by the writing of this poet, playwright and scriptwriter. ‘Ayoade embarked on a documentary, The Unfinished Harauld Hughes, to understand the unfathomable collapse of Hughes’s final film O Bedlam! O Bedlam!, taking us deep inside the most furious British writer since the Boer War’ says the blurb. Annabel loved this one, including it in her books of last year. Here’s her review.
I also have my doubts about Kaliane Bradley’s Women’s Prize for Fiction longlisted The Ministry of Time which is quite some way outside my usual reading territory but a host of starry names from Max Porter to Elinor Catton seem to love it plus, perhaps more convincingly, several bloggers whose opinions I trust. A civil servant is recruited to take part in a project to test the limits of time-travel, gathering in several historical figures including Commander Graham Gore who’s a wee bit surprised to be alive in the here and now having died as part of Sir John Franklin’s Arctic expedition in 1847. A love affair ensues, apparently.
April’s first short fiction collection is Amor Towles’s Table for Two made up of six stories all set in New York around the year 2000 plus a novella set in Golden Age Hollywood. Described by the publisher as a ‘noirish tale’, Eve in Hollywood follows Evelyn Ross from Towles’s novel Rules of Civility as she sets out on a new life in Los Angeles. ‘Written with his signature wit, humor, and sophistication, Table for Two is another glittering addition to Towles’s canon of stylish and transporting fiction’ says the blurb promisingly. Keen to read this one – I loved Rules of Civility. Annabel has reviewed it very positively here.
That’s it for April’s first batch of paperbacks. A click on a title will take you either to my review or to a more detailed synopsis should you want to know more, and if you’d like to catch up with new fiction it’s here and here. Part two soon…
