A time travelling mumfluencer and the pitfalls of AI in this weeks literary
Yesteryear is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke (Fourth Estate £16.99, 400pp)
Anne Hathaway is already signed up to the movie adaptation of this buzzy, high-concept debut about an American Christian trad-wife influencer, Natalie, whose dispatches from her throwback organic ranch – where she lives with her husband and five children without phones, pesticides or outside help – have attracted millions of followers.
But when Natalie finds herself in the 1855 reality of her 21st-century fantasy, she starts to wonder if she is the victim of a Truman Show-style TV con trick.
Through the lens of one woman’s social media-fuelled psychosis, this pacy, entertaining novel reaches deep into both the rotten heart of MAGA-style American feminism and the cynical, sinister delusions of that nation’s supremacist Christian patriotism. Grimly gripping.
Transcription is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Transcription by Ben Lerner (Granta £14.99, 144pp)
A journalist is in town to interview his student mentor Thomas – a brilliant, reclusive polymath – when disaster strikes: he drops his phone into a sink full of water.
From this brilliantly rendered set piece – the queasy panic; the abject impotence that kicks in whenever we find ourselves away from home without a phone – Lerner spins a stealthy, hypnotic story of 21st century digital life and all its compounded existential anxieties.
Split into three parts (the second exposes the journalist, who has published his interview ‘from memory’; the third is narrated by Thomas’s son), it repeatedly gnaws away at the questions of how to render the truth of things in a world overwhelmed by multiple versions of reality. A coolly brilliant novel that demands to be read again, and again, and again.
Communion is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Communion by Jon Doyle (Atlantic £17.99, 288pp)
This tantalising debut talks about subjects that most contemporary fiction studiously avoids: faith, working-class identity, the question of how to live a moral, meaningful life.
Mack is back in his home town of Port Talbot, having failed to become a priest, and has got a job in security at the local steelworks where his father’s generation has spent its entire working life.
But Mack is also burdened by the confession of a woman he knew as a teenager who is planning an act of sabotage, and feels compelled to help her, despite the consequences.
Taking place against the backdrop of both a three-day workers’ strike and the 2011 promenade production of The Passion at Port Talbot, which starred Michael Sheen, Doyle’s ambitious novel – in another rarity – refuses to bluntly telegraph its message and opts instead to offer the reader something more mysterious and beguilingly suggestive.