This week's paperback releases reviewed
Last Train From Liguria
Christine Dwyer Hickey
Atlantic Books, £ 7.99
Chrstine Dwyer Hickey is one of those writers who refuses to climb into a neat literary category and stay there. Her last book, Tatty, was a lyrical blend of novel and memoir that earned her comparisons with Hugo Hamilton. Last Train From Liguriatakes her into the territory of the historical novel: but here, too, she pushes the envelope, weaving an anarchic strand from 1990s Dublin into a satisfyingly rich tale which opens with a young Irish woman, Bella Stuart, taking a job in Italy in the 1930s as tutor to a wealthy aristocratic family. The set-up appears idyllic, but fascism is seeping into the air, as insidious as the smell of roasting garlic. This is a wonderful book, as easy-readable as any middle-of-the-road family saga, but with real historical depth and writing so graceful it occasionally makes you catch your breath. An Irish Captain Corelli's Mandolinperhaps? Buy it for the hols. You'll love it. Arminta Wallace
The Kindly Ones
Jonathan Littell
Vintage, £8.99
Max Aue is a businessman living a quiet life in France who also happens to be a former SS killer. In this long and violent book, he recalls the atrocities he witnessed, committed and imagined. Written in French by the American-born Jonathan Littell and now translated, The Kindly Oneshas already won France's most prestigious literary award, the Prix Goncourt. It has also, however, been honoured with the Literary Review's infamous Bad Sex Award, and the novel's gratuitous (and ridiculously revolting) scenes of sex and violence make it, ultimately, utterly repellent. As does Aue's pompous narration, which is sometimes unintentionally comic. Littell has claimed that he wanted to show how ordinary people can participate in great evil ("I am a man like other men, I am a man like you," declares Aue). But Aue is clearly anything but ordinary, and this sub-Sadean novel reveals nothing new or interesting about the corrupting influence of Nazism. Anna Carey
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
Daniyal Mueenuddin
Bloomsbury, £7.99
Daniyal Mueenuddin’s debut collection examines the overlapping lives of a large Pakistani landowning family in and around the often isolating world of their large rural plantations. The eight stories, while expertly framed and contained, also have a wonderful elliptical quality. Though each tale focuses on the struggles and aspirations of a certain individual, Mueenuddin manages, at times with absolute economy, to create subtly intriguing supporting characters who weave in and out of the frames. Their disappearances leave us craving further illumination so that when one story ends, the beginnings of another float in its wake, adding to the rich narrative that runs through the collection as a whole.
The sights, sounds, and especially tastes of the region are described in sensuous detail by the author as everything from lavish banquets to humble peasant dishes serve as colourful background to the inner turmoil and quietly observed emotional fragility of his protagonists. Dan Sheehan
The Bradshaw Variations
Rachel Cusk
Faber, £7.99
The Bradshaws are a married couple with one child, drifting towards their 40s, and, following a change of domestic arrangements, sands have begun to shift underfoot. In their own home and in the wider family circle we see husbands and wives ambushed by a kind of malaise, ushered towards self-evaluation.
Cusk's seventh novel, this encompassing family portrait, is a showcase for her insightful, deductive prose. The plot is certainly secondary to the exploration of character: Cusk's real gift is for revealing mystery in the banal. In her hands, the everyday acquires an edge of alarm: the selves to which we have long been accustomed – and of which we may even have grown bored – become suddenly tenuous constructs. As Cusk expands the family circle under her microscope, the novel tends to diffuse outward rather than move forward. The resultant plangency may not be to all tastes, but is surely forgivable, graced as it is with the author's luminous, contagious interest in her fellow men. Claire Anderson-Wheeler
The Women
TC Boyle
Bloomsbury, £7.99
It seems that TC Boyle has always been fascinated by the lives of real-life visionaries. In earlier novels, he explored the worlds of sexologist Alfred Kinsey and health-obsessed cornflake inventor Harvey Kellogg. Now he's turned his attention to the iconic architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Told by a (fictional) Japanese architect who enters Wright's home as an apprentice, this entertaining if uneven novel looks at the women in Wright's life, moving backwards in time from his third and final wife, a Serbian dancer called Olgivanna, to his mistress Mamah, who died in horrific circumstances. During his lifetime, Wright's personal dramas were front-page news, and it's not hard to see why – this is melodramatic stuff, and Boyle has great fun with it. However, sometimes it feels as though his own veneration for Wright (he actually lives in a Wright-designed house) is causing him to treat his real-life characters a little too gently. Anna Carey
