Interview with Tayari Jones

When I arrive at her publishers in Bloomsbury, Tayari Jones is in the middle of signing 5000 book plates which will be bound into the UK edition of her novel Silver Sparrow. Such are the demands on her since her novel An American Marriage won the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction.

She is resolutely professional but also clearly somewhat up against it on this short UK visit. She actually wrote Silver Sparrow before An American Marriage but she has deep affection for the earlier novel – its characters are “my favourite people”, she says – which was published in the UK in March 2020.

The novel is about a bigamist called James Witherspoon who has two teenage daughters, Dana and Chaurisse, with different mothers. James lives with Chaurisse and her mother but visits Dana and her mother on a weekly basis – Dana knows about Chaurisse but Chaurisse initially has no idea Dana exists.

Come Again by Robert Webb

The comedian and actor Robert Webb has followed his well-received memoir How Not to Be a Boy (TLS, September 15, 2017) with a time-travelling novel, Come Again. Webb’s heroine is the forty-five-year-old Kate Marsden, an IT specialist whose husband has recently dropped dead from a brain tumour. Kate is plunged into overwhelming grief, and Webb is very good on her anger at those friends who wish to pull her out of it. She rails against anything that might cheer her up, not least “Lunch. Fuck off, lunch”.

Webb also makes a good attempt to inhabit a woman’s body, neither over-eroticizing his heroine nor exaggerating her basic bodily functions in an effort to make them sound authentic. Kate also reveals the mystery behind so-called women’s intuition, saying, “I call it paying attention. Women are interested in how funny men’s minds work because we might need that knowledge to survive. So we end up anticipating things and it looks like a magic trick”

A Theatre for Dreamers by Polly Samson

The beautiful Greek island of Hydra became home to a bohemian community of expats in the 1960s, including the Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen and his Norwegian lover and muse Marianne Ihlen. The legacy of their relationship is the songs ‘So Long Marianne’, ‘Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye’ and ‘Bird on the Wire’. Their story is so intoxicating that it seems surprising it has not featured in a novel before, but perhaps others have been discouraged by the prospect of portraying someone as dauntingly well known as Cohen. Polly Samson rises beautifully to the challenge in her supremely accomplished A Theatre for Dreamers.

She wisely does not introduce Cohen immediately, and we see Hydra through the eyes of the watchful 18-year-old Erica, who, after her mother’s death, has come to seek out Charmian Clift, her mother’s friend.

Rake's Progress by Rachel Johnson

Rachel Johnson’s diary of her time as editor of The Lady magazine was a comic masterpiece. Those of us who consider it one of the funniest books ever written might wonder why she wastes her talent on anything else: novels, appearing on Celebrity Big Brother or, in fact, standing as a candidate for the European Parliament.

Johnson has now published another diary of sorts, about this latter experience: her decision to enter politics in 2019, when she stood as a candidate for Change UK in the European elections, a few months before her eldest brother became Prime Minister.

The book has been furnished with quotes from Marina Hyde and Jilly Cooper but sadly, it is not the moreish treat one might have hoped for. Even her best writing has a sense of haste about it.

Sex and Lies by Leïla Slimani

The Moroccan-born Leïla Slimani has made her name writing novels of propulsive intensity. Lullaby, the story of a nanny who kills the two children in her care, was the first to be published in English (it was also the most read book in France in 2016). Adèle, about a sex addict who takes little pleasure from increasingly violent and self-destructive sexual encounters, came next. It was while on a book tour of Morocco discussing Adèle that Slimani hit on the idea for Sex and Lies.

Many young women approached her at readings, wanting to tell her about their own sexual experiences, and it is these stories — that ‘shook me, upset me, that angered and sometimes disgusted me’ — that she has collected in this slim volume. In her introduction, Slimani references Scheherazade and says it is ‘because she reclaims her right to tell her own tale that she becomes not merely the object but the subject of the story’.

This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga

Tsitsi Dangarembga’s debut novel Nervous Conditions (1988) was the first by a black Zimbabwean woman to be published in English. In 2018, it was named by the BBC as one of the top 100 books to have shaped the world. Dangarembga published a sequel, The Book of Not, in 2016 and This Mournable Body is the third book in this series, although it can be read as a standalone novel.

Dangarembga returns to the story of Tambu—a teenager in Nervous Conditions, now a single middle-aged woman. Having recently left her disappointing job as an advertising copywriter, she is living in a women’s hostel in Harare.

Her lack of options haunts her: “Fear, your recurrent dread that you have not made enough progress toward security and a decent living, prickles like pins and needles.”