Tell Me Everything

For her 10th novel, Tell Me Everything, Elizabeth Strout has returned to familiar ground: characters from her earlier books, such as Bob Burgess, Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge, feature again. But whereas Strout has written novels centred on each of these figures to great success, only in this novel are they finally brought together.

In Crosby, a fictional town in Maine, the lawyer Bob Burgess takes on the defence of an apparently guileless man whose mother, Gloria Beach, has been murdered; the son has become the main suspect. Gloria Beach had been nicknamed “Bitch Ball” by local people, but as always with Strout, there’s more to the dead woman’s story than is initially obvious. Burgess fears for the accused, an isolated man who doesn’t own a mobile phone and whose main occupation appears to be painting pregnant women in the nude.

Wife by Charlotte Mendelson

Charlotte Mendelson has been described in The Times as a ‘master at family drama’, and her previous novel, The Exhibitionist (2022), contained in Ray Hanrahan one of the most odious fictional husbands ever. Mendelson clearly has an appetite as well as talent for writing awful spouses. In her latest novel, Wife, Penny Cartwright is if anything even worse.

This is the story of a lesbian relationship that sours. The book begins at the marriage’s end, but in its slightly confusing structure it leaps back to the beginning and then forward again. In fairness, these time- jumps are clearly signalled and I think the sense of bewilderment they nonetheless create is intentional. Although the narrative is in the third person, this is really an account of what happened from the point of view of Zoe Stamper, Penny’s wife, who has been thoroughly gaslit, so the sense of the reader being on the back foot beside her feels deliberate.

The claustrophobic bullying in the marriage is so well done that I found it nausea-inducing.

I Will Live by Lale Gül

Ik ga leven, an autobiographical debut novel by 23-year-old Lale Gül, was first published in Dutch in 2021. On release, it became an immediate bestseller – yet Gül received death threats and ended up ostracised by her family. Now that the book is appearing in translation as I Will Live, Anglophone readers can see why.

Gül’s novel tells the story of 20-year-old Büsra, who’s living what she describes a “schizophrenic” existence as a young Muslim woman in Amsterdam. She was born in the Netherlands, but her family are what she calls “Euroturks”, and visit their relatives each summer in the Turkish village from which her parents hail. At home, Büsra fights these “begetters”, who insist she wear a headscarf and distinguish herself from unbelieving women who’re like “fruit without a peel, lollies without a wrapper”.

Her illiterate mother acts as the enforcer, throwing (for example) a wedge shoe at Büsra’s face for a small perceived transgression. Büsra’s brother, Halil, in contrast, has “all the freedom to manoeuvre he wants”.

True Love by Paddy Crewe

Paddy Crewe’s second novel is set in his native north-east England in the 1980s, a particularly grim period for the region when unemployment was high due to the closures of steel works and coal mines. It is a gear-change from his much-praised and expansive debut novel My Name is Yip (2022) which was set in the 1830s Georgia gold rush. Many of the scenes in True Love instead conjure up the kind of parochial English melancholy that the singer Morrissey specialises in. Its open-hearted title is also perhaps a clue to how earnest this novel is. The main characters are two young people: Keely and Finn, who don’t meet until the third and final section of the book. The first section of the novel, “Seacoaler”, delineates Keely’s childhood living in a caravan on a campsite with her father, a seacoaler — someone who makes their living by collecting and selling coal washed up on the beach. He becomes emotionally absent — and eventually, literally absent — after the death by drowning of Keely’s brother Welty.

Table for Two by Amor Towles

Amor Towles was a Wall Street banker before he published his first novel, Rules of Civility, in 2011, at the age of 46. Since then, his books have sold six million copies, and the second, A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), has been made into a Paramount + series starring Ewan McGregor.

Towles’s success in banking and publishing has perhaps given him a particular insight into the American Dream. The six stories and one novella that make up his stylish and confident new collection, Table for Two, all feature characters in pursuit of an ambition that puts them in varying degrees of peril – protagonists tasked with missions of differing seriousness. There is the Russian peasant who must tell his communist wife that he has accidentally bought them tickets to New York; a forger of famous authors’ signatures; the daughter who follows her stepfather incognito to find out where he goes on Saturday afternoons; and the stranger who promises to keep an alcoholic out of a bar and get him on a plane.

This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud

Claire Messud’s fourth novel, The Woman Upstairs (2013), was notable for having a genuine twist – a reminder of how rare that is in literary fiction. Messud has nonetheless produced such a rarity again in This Strange Eventful History.

For her seventh novel, the saga of the Cassar clan, Messud has turned to her own family history. The novel reaches from Algeria, where her paternal grandparents were raised, to Connecticut, where Messud herself was born, and from 1927 to 2010. The Cassar family go to war, move continents, develop dementia and alcoholism, and marry or fail to: this is not a milieu in which remaining single is viewed as a dignified choice.

This Strange Eventful History is told in the third person: Gaston is the Cassar patriarch, and while he and his wife Lucienne consider their marriage to be “the masterpiece” of their lives, it contains a troubling secret.