The best Literary Fiction of the week: A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar, One Sun
A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar (Simon and Schuster £12.99, 224pp)
This excellent novel, set in an overheating India stricken by famine, compresses big questions about immigration, climate change and the post-Imperial world order into a semi-absurdist black thriller.
Ma is preparing to finally join her husband in America, young daughter and elderly father in tow, when a thief steals her precious visas from her home.
Yet the thief has leverage: he knows Ma has been stealing from the local housing shelter and issues a condition – hand over her house and the visas are hers.
Nothing goes to plan in this propulsive black farce which combines vertiginous plot twists and a persuasive doomy atmosphere with a terrific spin on the moral hypocrisy of the Indian middle classes.
One Sun Only by Camille Bordas (Serpent’s Tail £12.99, 304pp)
Bordas turns the short story form upside down with this Marmite collection which seizes on trains of thought and humorous reactions to humdrum incidents, rather than gripping scenarios.
There’s not much point trying to summarise the stories – Bordas doesn’t really do plot in an obvious sense.
Instead, be prepared to be sucked into various offbeat predicaments: a father’s concern over his young son’s death-fixated scribbles (‘what was wrong with drawing your own grave anyway’, wonders the dad); a writer’s futile efforts to win the lottery in a Spanish town.
Bordas shares Alice Munro’s knack for hitching a story to the least probable premise but some readers might find her laidback use of irony just a little too outre for pleasure.
Not so much slices of life as inside-out slashes.
Wreck by Catherine Newman (Doubleday £16.99, 256pp)
This domestic family comedy is a loose sequel to Newman’s 2024 novel Sandwich but you don’t need to have read the latter to enjoy it.
You do, however, need to be able to stomach Newman’s kooky brand of sentimentality, which is never far from the surface however bad things get for her narrator, Rocky, a neurotic mother of two grown-up children who suffers from a serious capacity to over-empathise.
Two unrelated incidents set the plot rolling: an accident on a train line involving the death of Rocky’s son’s former friend, which may or may not have been caused by corporate negligence, and her discovery of a baffling rash in the middle of the night.
The life of the novel is in the telling rather than the destination, but for those allergic to Rocky’s gushy virtue-signalling eccentricities, this might be precisely the problem.