The Mission House by Carys Davies

Carys Davies has followed her highly praised debut, West, with another jewel of a novel. Hilary Byrd is a man dogged by “bad days” who seeks refuge in Ooty, a hill station in south India much prized by the British soldiers who first rode up there in 1819 and decided to build “a little corner of England. A place to rest in, out of the heat, and be comfortable and cool.” The evocation of a 1950s British idyll in India is so persuasive that it comes as a shock to read the word “email” – this, it transpires, is a novel set in the present day.

“The gingerbread eaves of the post office” in Ooty soothe Byrd, who is haunted by the memory of an elderly man calling him a “bald cunt” in the library where he’d worked for 25 years in south-east London. His only company now is Jamshed, the rickshaw driver who transports him around the small town, the Padre and his adoptive daughter, Priscilla, who live next to Byrd. Priscilla was born with no thumbs and a short right leg; when the Padre suggests he must find a good match for her, Byrd’s heart leaps at the idea this could be his destiny.

Islands of Mercy by Rose Tremain

Rose Tremain has followed her masterly The Gustav Sonata with an altogether different novel. In 1865, Clorinda Morrissey, a 38-year-old woman from Dublin, arrives in Bath and sells a ruby necklace in order to set up Mrs Morrissey’s High Class Tea Rooms. Mrs Morrissey believes that ‘the future was going to be perfumed with raspberry jam and freshly baked scones and fragrant lemon cake’.

The tea rooms also, however, once open, become the scene of Jane Adeane — a highly skilled nurse — rejecting a proposal from Dr Valentine Ross, her colleague at her father’s surgery. Jane has achieved a near-mythic status as a nurse in Bath and ‘was described as “The Angel”, or sometimes as “The Tall Angel” or “The White Angel’ or, more frequently, as ‘The Angel of the Baths”’. Jane flees to London after Dr Ross’s proposal to stay with her unconventional aunt — an unmarried painter called Emmeline Adeane and is soon seduced by a married Italian beauty, Julietta Sims.

The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue

Emma Donoghue’s publishers might regard it as a mixed blessing that her latest novel is set during the 1918 flu pandemic. While she can’t be faulted for topicality, it seems unlikely that many people will want to spend more time than they need to thinking about a deadly virus. This would be a shame as, for the most part, The Pull of the Stars is a beautifully modulated historical novel. There is also the comfort – for most of us – of how much more likely we all are to survive the current emergency than anyone on the 1918 Dublin maternity fever ward, the setting for Donoghue’s 13th novel. For a small cast, the death count here is high.

As anyone who has read Donoghue’s internationally bestselling novel Room – inspired by the grotesque Josef Fritzl case – will know, she is quick to draw the reader in. After only four short sentences, we can already smell the “dung and blood” of the Dublin streets as nurse Julia Power cycles to work at an understaffed hospital in the city centre. Donoghue’s prose is visceral, and the sense of peril in the cramped, tiny ward is compelling.

Intimations by Zadie Smith

Let’s get envy out of the way first. While many of us struggled to achieve anything during the first weeks of lockdown, barely baking a loaf of banana bread or completing a workout with Joe Wicks, Zadie Smith managed to write a whole book. It is a very slim book – 82 pages; six essays – but it’s a book, nonetheless. Anyone who feels piqued that this might be a money-spinner, though, should note that the author’s royalties are being donated to charity. Besides, Smith generously suggests that writing is simply something to do, no better or worse than baking, sewing a dress or completing “all the levels on Minecraft”.

These essays have been written from the standpoint of an impassioned reader. This is not new territory for Smith, who declared in an earlier collection of essays, Changing My Mind (2009), that: “Reading has always been my passion, my pleasure, and I am constitutionally drawn to any thesis that gives power to readers, increasing their freedom of movement.” 

Short story collections by Richard Ford, A. L. Kennedy & Maria Reva

Sorry For Your Trouble, Richard Ford’s 13th book of fiction, shows a writer still very much on song. The mainly male middle-aged protagonists of these nine stories seem often to be assessing their regrets but coming to terms with them. In ‘Second Language’, a man is enchanted by his glamorous second wife but able to accept when, after two years, she tells him (for no clear reason) that the marriage is over. Alongside multiple divorces, there are plenty of sudden deaths here — not least that of a wife who simply lays her head on her hands and stops breathing. A doctor later diagnoses cancer, but the conclusion is: ‘Dying was likely the only real symptom she’d experienced.’

The most disturbing story is ‘Displaced’, in which a vulnerable boy becomes desperate for friendship after the death of his father. His only mate is a jaded, older adolescent who, unprompted, kisses him when they go to a drive-in movie. The friend concludes the evening by saying: ‘You’ll kill and steal and break people’s hearts and fuck your sister and burn down houses.’

Books to Make You Laugh

The lockdown might be ending but there is still grim news on the television, so we’re reaching for a little light hearted distraction in the form of these comedic books.

The Hungover Games by Sophie Heawood

Anyone who has read Sophie Heawood’s journalism will know what a brilliantly original and perceptive writer she is, from the hilarious column she wrote about Valentine’s Day, to a mind-boggling interview with the actor Jada Pinkett Smith. Her first book gets off to a strong start: Heawood describes taking home a stranger she meets on an app, thinking about Jesus to make herself orgasm and then being interrupted by her small child whom her date has no idea exists. We held our breath as she recounts driving her friends back from Coachella whilst she is heavily pregnant and also unable to drive. She is open-hearted in describing her own dysfunctionality: at one point, she wanders into a house she likes the look of and proceeds to flick through an engagement diary she finds.