‘A zippy, witty puzzler of conceptual cleverness’: The best Literary Fiction out now –
THE BENEFACTORS by Wendy Erskine (Sceptre £18.99, 336pp)
Erskine, a secondary school teacher in Northern Ireland, made her name as a writer with short stories so brimful of life that they often seemed to overspill the ordinary bounds of the form.
It’s no surprise that her excellent debut novel somehow manages to make room for more than 50 characters, thanks to a polyphonic structure stringing loosely connected cameos around the main drama.
Set in Belfast, it centres on the alleged sexual assault of a young hotel worker by three 18-year-old boys. The aftermath, explored chiefly from the point of view of everyone’s parents, is interspersed with fleeting glimpses of unconnected stories from around the city, adding extra bite to the novel’s key themes of money and responsibility.
A bold narrative experiment, given legs by Erskine’s near-magical ability to imagine her way into the tiniest details of everyday life.
MONAGHAN by Timothy O’Grady (Unbound £16.99, 400pp)
O’Grady’s fourth novel – his first since 2004’s Light – is a complex meditation on the legacy of conflict in Northern Ireland, exploring the undying sense of inner turmoil in its survivors and combatants.
It’s narrated by Ronan, an architecture lecturer in New York, whose midlife crisis accelerates when he falls into the orbit of a shadowy painter from the same Irish border town where he grew up.
We plunge into each man’s psyche amid a series of nested dialogues that fill gaps in Ronan’s family history as well as fuelling the sense that, as an academic, he’s been living a lie, far from the fray.
Searing passages portray the bloodshed of the 1970s as a ceaseless cycle of payback, as the plot takes the form of a slow-burn cat-and-mouse quest luring the characters back into a past they can’t escape.
THE ORIGINAL by Nell Stevens (Scribner £12.99, 400pp)
Stevens is an inventive memoirist and novelist whose work plays gleefully with the 19th-century canon – her previous books have involved the lives of Elizabeth Gaskell and French writer George Sand.
Her new book – a pacy Victorian pastiche dealing with art and desire – has a lot of fun blurring the category advertised by its title, nudging us to reconsider what counts as genuine or fake.
Set in 1899, it follows Grace, raised by an uncaring family on a country estate. As a budding painter, she has a lucrative talent for copying other people’s canvases, yet can’t recognise faces – which adds to the uncertainty when a visitor turns up claiming to be her long-lost cousin, lighting the fuse on a twisty plot of secrets and lies.
A zippy, witty puzzler that puts its conceptual cleverness firmly in the service of readerly pleasure.