I’ve read just one from the second part of January’s preview but I’m kicking off with another I’m eagerly anticipating. You might think I’d had enough of 
American politics but it’s the political thread that attracts me to Elizabeth Harris’s How to Sleep at Night. Ethan and Gabe are happily raising their daughter together despite drifting to very different ends of the political spectrum. When Ethan announces he plans to run for Congress as a Republican, it’s not only Gabe’s world that’s upended. Ethan’s sister is a jaded political reporter for a national newspaper dallying with an affair with her ex when Ethan’s decision threatens to derail her career. ‘A sharply observed comedy of manners about public image versus private life, How to Sleep at Night is a witty and whip-smart novel that dissects family ties stretched thin by politics’ says the blurb. Very much like the sound of that.
Richard Price’s Lazarus Man is a bit outside my usual neck of the literary woods but Price was one of the writers on The Wire, still one of the best things I’ve seen on TV. His novel is set in east Harlem in 2008 when a five-storey apartment block collapses killing six tenants. By the end of the day many others are missing. Price follows several characters whose lives are irreversibly changed by the tragedy, from the young photographer who records the ensuing chaos to a survivor who was buried for days. ‘Rich with indelible characters and high drama, Lazarus Man is a riveting work of suspense and social vision by one of our major writers’ says the blurb.
It’s some time since I read anything by Caryl Phillips and I’ve a feeling I didn’t take to his writing style very well but the premise of Another Man in the Street is a very attractive one. Victor ‘Lucky’ Johnson arrives in London from St Kitts in the early ‘60s, hoping for a career in journalism but eventually becoming a rent collector for a slum landlord. Phillips’s novel explores the experience of the Windrush generation through Victor’s story, following him from his arrival to the present day. ‘Another Man in the Street is an unforgettable story of loss, displacement, belonging, and the triumph of Black resilience – epic in scope and yet profoundly intimate, and a radical and timely portrait of immigrant London’ says the blurb making me keen to read it.
Published by Daunt Originals who seem to have a sharp editorial eye, Angelo Tijssens’ debut novel, The Edges, sees a man returning to his hometown after the death of his mother, unable to resist visiting his former lover. ‘As we are drawn into the narrator’s past, we see how a childhood marked by abuse and a life lived on the edges can shape someone – and what respite and beauty can be found in love and trust’ says the blurb suggesting a hopeful resolution.
I was a big fan of Adrian Duncan’s Love Notes from a German Building Site, The Geometer Lobachevsky not so much but I’m keen to read his new one, The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth. An Irish restorative painter falls in love with an Italian sociologist, reawakening memories of an incident that has overshadowed his life. Years later, he’s asked to pray for a dying friend and spends a day roaming the streets of Bologna, contemplating his own life, past and present, and its foundations. ‘A delicately crafted novel of two halves, a decade apart, The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth is a masterful excavation of human desires, inhibitions, and the patterns of habit to which we unwittingly fall prey’ says the blurb promisingly
Lucy Steeds’s The Artist begins in 1957 with a woman gazing at a painting she knows intimately in London’s National Gallery before winding back to the summer of 1920 when a young art journalist travels to Provence, hoping to interview the renowned and notoriously reclusive Edouard Tartuffe who agrees only on the basis that Joseph will model for him. Tata’s every need is attended to by Ettie who has hardly left the remote farmhouse where she and her uncle live. As the summer wears on, Joseph unravels a perplexing mystery, and Ettie sees a way for her own artistic talent to be recognised. Steeds’s debut is gorgeously immersive, the summer Provencal landscape vividly evoked and her descriptions of art arresting. Highly recommend this one. Review shortly…
That’s it for January’s new fiction. As ever, a click on a title will take you to a more detailed synopsis should you want to know more, and if you’d like to catch up with part one it’s here. Paperbacks soon…
