I’ve read none of the novels from this first batch of May paperbacks which begins with one that’s impressed several bloggers I follow. I wasn’t as enamoured with Charlotte Wood’s The Weekend as many readers but I’ll be trying again with her new one, Stone Yard Devotional, which sees a middle-aged woman seeking peace and refuge fetching up in a small religious community in the Australian outback, almost by accident. Three things disrupt the tranquillity she finds there: a plague of mice, the unearthing of the remains of a nun, long since disappeared, and the arrival of someone who forces her to examine her past. I’m not entirely sure about that but Kim’s review here is very persuasive. 
Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Long Island Compromise begins with the kidnapping of a wealthy businessman in 1982, returned to his family after a ransom is paid. Forty years later, the trauma of that event comes back to haunt Carl when his mother dies, and long buried memories resurface. ‘Long Island Compromise spans generations, winding through decades of history all the way through to the wild present, dealing along the way with all the mainstays of American Jewish life. And through it all, it addresses timeless questions about wealth, trauma, and the American soul’ according to the blurb. Although I didn’t enjoy the much-hyped Fleishman is in Trouble as much as I’d expected, this one sounds worth investigating.
Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History begins in 1940 with Paris about to fall to the Germans. Gaston Cassar has been posted to Salonica hoping that he will eventually be reunited with his family when the war is over. ‘A work of breathtaking historical sweep and vivid psychological intimacy, This Strange Eventful History charts the Cassars’ unfolding story as its members move between Salonica and Algeria, the US, Cuba, Canada, Argentina, Australia and France – their itinerary shaped as much by a search for an elusive wholeness, as by the imperatives of politics, faith, family, industry and desire’ says the blurb rather grandly but a new novel from Messud is always worth investigating.
I admit to being swayed by the George Saunders puff included in the blurb for Camille Bordas’s The Material set in a Chicago stand-up comedy school where staff and students all wrestle with the kind of problems that offer grist for the comedy mill. A visit from the controversial Manny Rheinhardt could either be just what’s needed to lick them into shape or a disaster. ‘Set over the course of a single day, and shifting exquisitely between several points of view, The Material examines life through the eyes of a band of outsiders bound together by the need to laugh, and the desire to make others laugh even harder’ according to the blurb which sounds quite cheering.
It’s its structure that draws me to Catherine Gray’s Versions of a Girl in which fourteen-year-old Fern is faced with a dilemma: whether to stay in California where her father scratches a living or travel to London where her social climbing mother leads a much more comfortable life. As the title suggests, Gray follows Fern down two very different pathways, but both versions are faced with what to do about a murder. ‘Warm and brilliantly wise, this is the irresistible fiction debut from the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober.’ Not entirely sure about that but I do like that Sliding Doors idea. Clever cover, too.
That’s it for May’s first batch of paperbacks. 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 new fiction it’s here and here. Part two soon…
