The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelson
This is the most entertaining novel we’ve read all year – there a few more enticing things than a novelist who knows their characters inside out and Charlotte Mendelson has written about another messily dysfunctional North London family. Her description of their “tannined sink” conjures up exactly the kind of smug bourgeois tribe she is so brilliant at depicting and the worse it gets for the Hanrahans, the better it gets for us. Father Ray is an artist about to stage a new exhibition but he is corrosively jealous of his more talented wife, Lucia. Their adult children tolerate Ray to varying degrees – Jess is unable to toe the family line that he is a genius, whilst her beautiful sister Leah acts as supplicant to him and their troubled elder brother Patrick is trying to opt out of family life to the extent he can. Throw into the mix Jess’s boyfriend Martyn – who is more in love with her family than he is with her – as well as a hotshot art collector on the scene and an addictive affair for Lucia, and this becomes a gripping treat of a novel. Whilst Mendelson ratchets up the tension, she also writes beautifully about illness, erotic obsession and how to go against the grain.
Claire Powell’s first novel, At the Table, is about the Maguire family from south London: mum Linda, dad Gerry and their adult children Nicole and Jamie. Powell creates the world of the book by pointing out details like an anthropologist – a Liberty carrier bag, Noccellara olives and not least, letterbox flowers – so that the reader knows exactly the milieu the narrative is rooted in. Each chapter revolves around a meal but this is done with such sleight of hand that it never seems gimmicky and in fact, it is not immediately apparent.
Whilst plenty happens to the characters – at least one marriage breaks down, one character develops an eating disorder and another is forced to confront their drinking – on the whole, Powell eschews high drama.
All of the characters are selfish and resentful but because they seem real, this never feels alienating. Powell is good at the comedy of awkwardness and there is a sexual encounter that is more viscerally embarrassing than anything I can remember reading in fiction. She is also very good at showing, in spite of how much they irritate each other, how deeply these characters care about each other. Fans of Sally Rooney will eat this up.
We are fans of Alex Hyde’s highly original debut novel, Violets. It traces the lives of two young women towards the end of the Second World War, both called Violet and is based on the story of the author’s father’s adoption. We meet Violet Hall in a hospital bed in Birmingham, recovering from an operation just as her husband Fred hears he is to be deployed overseas again. In Wales, Violet Owen is unmarried but pregnant by a Polish soldier who has been lodging with her family. Violet Hall continues to work in the munitions factory but Violet Owen hastily decides to join the Auxiliary Territorial Services and heads off to Naples. Her letters home edit her life in Italy heavily so they contain none of the glamour or squalor of her existence “No port, no cove, no filth, no decay. No light. No shade.” Hyde has managed to write a novel that is both elegant and visceral, exploring complex aspects of motherhood in a highly unusual way. Recommended.
This is Monica Ali’s first novel for a decade and we can honestly say it was worth the wait. Yasmin Ghorami is training to be a doctor, just like her immigrant father Shaokat and her sex-addicted fiancé Joe. Much of the pleasure of the novel comes from the interactions between Yasmin’s parents and Joe’s mother, a freethinking feminist who lives in Primrose Hill and is delighted that her son is marrying someone of Bangladeshi heritage. The mother in question, Harriet, had posed for a notorious naked photo in her youth, staring defiantly at the camera (it is hard not to think of the famous nude picture of Germaine Greer here). Yasmin’s dropout brother Arif is thrilled to discover the picture and the stage is set for interfamilial pyrotechnics but things do not play out at all as one imagines. This is a big-hearted, complex and richly satisfying novel which is often very funny and long enough to keep you company on holiday.
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
This feel-good book has topped the best-sellers lists and for good reason. Chemist Elizabeth Zott battles inequality with her all-male team at a research Laboratory in the early 1960s, then prejudice as a single mother and jealousy as the reluctant star of a cooking show. If that sounds like hard work to read about, it most definitely isn’t as Garmus has created a most endearing heroine in Zott: unconventional, uncompromising and a joy to read about.
Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life by Delia Ephron
It sounds like a Nora Ephron romcom; a 72-year-old widow falls for a man she dated 54 years prior when he contacts her out of the blue via email. And yet this is the true story of Delia Ephron’s ‘second chance at love’. Having lost her sister to cancer, swiftly followed by her husband, Jerry, she tried to shut down his landline which proved a tech nightmare. Delia wrote a comic New York Times op-ed about the experience which caught the eye of Peter, an old flame she had dated after being set up her sister, Nora. The two fell madly in love. This is their story, including the final twist; a cancer diagnosis for Delia herself.
English Garden Eccentrics by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan
A close look at some bonkers English gardens from the early seventeenth to early twentieth centuries. Think miniature mountains, shaped topiaries, exotic animals, excavated caves and fossils. Landscape gardener and historian Todd Longstaffe-Gowan studies each gardener and their creations as a kind of artistic autobiography. Great inspiration for bold gardeners.
A Little Bird Loves
