Literary Fiction that is ‘impressive on every level’: THE RENOVATION by Kenan Orhan, THE
THE RENOVATION by Kenan Orhan (Hamish Hamilton £16.99, 256pp)
This superb first novel opens in Italy, the country to which psychologist Dilara, her husband, and her Alzheimer’s-stricken, former politics professor father have emigrated after the latter was brutally attacked in Turkey.
But when Dilara finds that her newly renovated bathroom is not the expected en suite, but a portal to a prison cell in Istanbul, she finds herself granted a complicated, tantalising glimpse of the city she still loves.
Memory, language, home and identity are as fragile and subject to injury as Dilara’s frail, fast-ailing father.
At once an urgent allegory about what it is to live in exile, it’s equally a powerful, visceral and heartbreakingly uncompromising portrait of dementia. Impressive on every level.
THE DELUSIONS by Jenni Fagan (Hutchinson Heinemann £18.99, 320pp)
Fagan was selected as a Granta Best Young British Novelist on the basis of her debut, 2012’s The Panopticon.
Her canvas here is the universe itself, although her concerns are entirely human. On Earth, fiery forty- something Edi was a tattooist; in the afterlife, she’s an “Admin”, processing the recently deceased and getting them to give up their much-cherished delusions.
But Edi has a secret mission: to be reunited with her beloved son.
With its spectacular galactic setting and its cast that, after a mysterious event back on Earth, ultimately encompasses all the living AND the dead, this a novel in which everything is turned up to 11.
The rants and riffs of misanthrope Edi – who, despite all she’s seen, can’t shake her sneaking sympathy for humanity – become slightly exhausting and at moments eclipse the plot, although not the ultimate message about the triumph of love.
LOVE LANE by Patrick Gale (Tinder Press £20, 304pp)
This isn’t a sequel to Gale’s Costa-shortlisted A Place Called Winter, but it does begin with that book’s protagonist.
Harry Cane has built a life as a farmer on the vast Canadian plains, and even found comfort in the arms of his brother-in-law (it was a scandal that forced Harry from Edwardian England in the first place). But times are changing, Harry is ageing, and a letter from Betty, the daughter he left behind, is the catalyst for a journey back to 1950s Liverpool.
Harry’s visit is largely a framing device, a pretext for a gentle, absorbing unfolding of the experiences and mores of new generations: housewife Betty; her prisoner governor husband Terry; and her two daughters, lively Pip and highly-strung Whistle.
Drawing substantially on Gale’s own family history, this empathic novel has the texture of social history: expect quiet surprises over sudden twists, and a satisfying, moving conclusion.