Fox Fires by Wyl Menmuir

Wyl Menmuir’s first novel, The Many, was a surprise inclusion on the 2016 Booker Prize longlist. It drew praise for its discomfiting prose, but the fact that it had been written in a VW camper van on the north Cornish coast — where it was set — also drew attention.

The village in The Many appeared to be forgotten by the outside world, and the setting for Fox Fires is similarly isolated. Nineteen-year-old Wren Lithgow arrives in a mysterious European city state called O with her concert pianist mother. The peril they are in isn’t laboured, but the reader realises it by degrees — as Wren does. She was conceived in O, and on this return visit she resolves to track down her father, although she is not even sure of his name and cannot speak the local language, O’chian. The only clues she has to his identity are a single photo of her parents and a broken wind-up doll he gave her mother, which she has named Ariadne.

The claustrophobia of Wren’s relationship with her mother (at one point she keeps her hands in her pockets to stop herself from slapping her) is intensified by the secrecy and restrictions in O.

The Startup Wife by Tahmima Anam

After Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003) became a smash hit bestseller, novels with the word “wife” in the title began to proliferate, perhaps peaking with the publication of Jane Corry’s My Husband’s Wife (2016).

Tahmima Anam has now made her own contribution, with The Startup Wife.  Anyone who has read Anam’s previously published trilogy of novels tracing the chronicles of a family from the Bangladesh war of independence to the present day, will know not to expect a domestic thriller from her latest book, however. The word “wife” dangles in the title as an apparent warning, nonetheless.

Asha Ray, a talented computer scientist halfway through her PhD, is the wife. At a funeral, she meets again the man she had had a high school crush on, 13 years after she last saw him and they marry without ceremony two months later. Her new husband, Cyrus Jones, has magnificent hair, a dead mother and is “encyclopaedically brilliant”. He is also, his wife observes, “a little bit ghost”.

Second Place by Rachel Cusk

“I once told you, Jeffers, about the time I met the devil on a train leaving Paris.” Rachel Cusk’s latest novel, “Second Place”, begins with this arresting recollection. At the end of the book a brief note informs readers that it “owes a debt to ‘Lorenzo in Taos’, Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 memoir of the time D.H. Lawrence came to stay with her in Taos, New Mexico”. It is not necessary to be familiar with this antecedent, however, to enjoy the oddly compelling (if intermittently baffling) story that Ms Cusk tells in the pages in between. 

Only ever referred to as M, the narrator is living happily with her second husband Tony “in a place of great but subtle beauty” in an unnamed country. It is 15 years after she encountered the devil (Jeffers, to whom she confides this hallucinatory experience, is her implied interlocutor throughout). Ms Cusk keeps the details of the landscape vague but the “woolly marsh” does not sound like New Mexico. M invites L, a painter and a friend of a friend, to stay at her “second place”, a cottage M and Tony have built on their land. 

The High House by Jessie Greengrass

Jessie Greengrass’s first novel Sight (2018) was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. The narrator of that experimental book wove readings about major developments in medical history into her own decision to have a child.

Greengrass’s second novel, The High House, is part of the recent flowering of literary fiction by women exploring the climate crisis that includes Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From, as well as Weather by Jenny Offill and Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee.

Although The High House is a story of familial bonds, the split narrative doesn’t initially make it easy to work out who is related to who. In the opening sections two women—Caro and Sally—recount their separate childhoods. Both are looking back to their early lives from the vantage point of a post-apocalyptic scenario, which has seen them form a makeshift family living at the High House, alongside Caro’s younger stepbrother Pauly, son of a climate scientist.

The Office of Historical Corrections

Danielle Evans, who published her 2010 story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self to great acclaim and has fans including Alicia Keys and Roxane Gay, has said she writes long, rather than short, stories – and this new collection certainly provides space to explore knotty subject matter.

In “Boys Go to Jupiter”, a picture of a white college student wearing a Confederate flag bikini goes viral. The image antagonises her black hallmate Carmen, who reposts it, and Claire – the bikini wearer – receives angry, supportive and even pornographic messages.

Carmen moves dorm for her own safety, but Evans writes the story from the point of view of Claire, showing the way in which a social media storm can develop its own momentum: “Her student account’s address has been posted on several message boards and #clairewilliamsvacationideas is a locally trending topic (Auschwitz, My Lai, Wounded Knee).”

Hot Stew by Fiona Mozley

For a novel set partly in a Soho brothel, Hot Stew is an oddly bloodless affair. Tawdry characters drift in and out of each other’s lives but rarely seem to capture the author’s full imagination. Fiona Mozley’s first novel, Elmet, concerned a self-sufficient family living in Yorkshire and occupying ‘a strange, sylvan otherworld’, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017. This second book is a decided change of tack.

The prose sometimes has an appealing vagueness:

“After the war, the concrete came, and parallel lines, and precise angles that connected earth to sky. Houses were rebuilt, shops were rebuilt, and new paving stones were laid. The dead were buried. The past was buried. There were new kinds of men and new kinds of women. There was art and music and miniskirts and sharp haircuts to match the skyline.