This week’s all about the new publishing year which kicks off with lots of potential treats for those of us in need of diversion from the winter gloom, beginning with two I’ve already read. The blurb for Catherine Airey’s Confessions promised an involving tale of two Irish sisters, one of whom emigrates to New York to take up an art school scholarship ticking two of my literary boxes. Máire and Rósín’s stories span several decades beginning in the 1970s when they’re growing up in an Irish village not far from the house which one will paint and the other will eventually live in, making it the setting for a choose-your-own-adventure computer video game. A long, intricately plotted, luxurious read, perfect for long January evenings. Review soon…
Clare Sestanovich’s Ask Me Again begins with 16-year-old Eva meeting James in a Brooklyn hospital waiting room. Theirs is an unlikely friendship, each from very different backgrounds, and yet it lasts for many years. While Eva pursues her journalistic ambition, James drops out of college, joining the Occupy encampment on Wall Street moving in with Eva’s parents when it’s disbanded, then turning to a ramshackle church in his continuing search for meaning which will eventually lead to disaster. A few chapters in, I wondered if I might give up this introspective novel but the more I thought about it the more impressed I became. I’m loath to make comparisons but if you’re a Sally Rooney fan, this one should suit you nicely. Review shortly…
Rósín O’Donnell’s debut, Nesting, follows a woman who flees her home with her two young daughters, convinced that’s it’s no longer safe for them to live there. Her hoped for escape proves to be tougher than she’d thought with little money, no option but to live in a hotel room and her husband’s determination to get her back to the family home. ‘Tense, beautiful, and underpinned by an unassailable love, hope and resilience, this is the story of one woman’s bid to start over’ say the publishers of a novel much praised by Sheila Armstrong and Roddy Doyle.
The blurb tells me Lisa Sandlin’s Sweet Vidalia is for readers of Elizabeth Strout and Anne Tyler which immediately makes me wary but I like the sound of its premise. Set in ‘60s Texas, it follows Eliza after the death of her husband which has provoked a revelation that her apparently happy life has been based on a lie. She sets about building a future for herself, enrolling in business classes and moving into the eponymous hotel but ‘as she gathers new friends and new possibilities open up before her, Eliza finds it isn’t so simple to leave the past behind’ says the blurb. We’ll see.
I’m not entirely sure about Sanam Mahloudji’s The Persians which spans the 1940s to the 2000s, following three generations of women through their tumultuous lives. While their mother stayed put in Tehran, her two daughters made lives for themselves in the US. When one of them lands herself in jail after a disastrous vacation, she sets about restoring the family’s perceived reputation. According to the blurb ‘The Persians is a darkly funny, deeply moving and profoundly searching portrait of a unique family in crisis. Here is their past, their present and a possible new future for them all’. It’s the mention of an ’Islamic lawbreaking’ partying Iranian granddaughter that interests me in this one.
Andrew Ridker’s Hope follows the Greenspan family who live in Brookline, Massachusetts. Scott is an esteemed cardiologist; his wife works in a distinguished New York publishing house while his son is in medical school. An unimpeachable family, or so it seems until Scott is caught up in a scandal involving the faking of blood tests. Hope ‘is a painfully funny account of the tumultuous year that follows, written by one of the most brilliant young American novelists at work today’ say the publishers rather ambitiously. I remember enjoying Ridker’s previous novel, The Altruists.
That’s it for January’s first batch of new fiction. As ever, a click on a title will take you to a more detailed synopsis for any that take you fancy. Part two soon…
