Bloomsbury £10.99 pp258
See’s impressive and thought-provoking novel sprang from her fascination with reports of a secret language — nu shu — once used in parts of China exclusively by women. Her heroine, Lily, is separated from her best friend Snow Flower by marriage and motherhood, but through the years, the pair use nu shu to keep their affection alive and to share their troubles. We get little sense of what that language might have been, but See conjures up, vividly and sometimes disturbingly, the separate world inhabited by women. Only to Snow Flower can Lily acknowledge her deepest, often contradictory feelings. She admits that foot-binding affected her heart as well as her body; but at moments she breaks out in anger at her friend’s refusal to “wrap herself in the conventions that protected women”.
THE REALM OF SHELLS
by Sonia Overall
Fourth Estate £17.99 pp326
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Eight-year-old Fanny is lonely when her school-teacher father moves his family down to the seaside town of Margate in 1835. In her letters to her elder brother James, still in London, she proves an engaging and perceptive heroine; for all her naivety, she is shrewdly observant about her own family, and about their new acquaintances. Her life seems transformed when her brother Joshua stumbles upon something magical: a mysterious underground grotto, its walls covered in a “twirling twisting” mosaic of fans and flowers and stars, all made from shells, that glint and shimmer in candlelight. Overall writes movingly about the children’s excited pleasure, and traces their gradual, increasingly bitter disillusionment when they feel they must admit their secret to adults who, inevitably, exploit and ultimately destroy their discovery.
CANAAN’S TONGUE
by John Wray
Chatto £17.99 pp341
This ambitious and disturbing novel, hailed as a masterpiece by American critics, was inspired by a brief reference in Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi to a charismatic villain styled the “Redeemer” who enticed slaves to escape, promising them money as well as freedom. He made enormous profits by selling the same men repeatedly; they often ended up dead. Wray’s long novel, set in 1863, conjures up, vividly and disturbingly, a seedy, greedy underworld inhabited by slaves, whores, and depressed and desperate men who have little choice but to do anything — even commit murder — at the Redeemer’s bidding. His follower Virgil Ball (who confesses near the start that he eventually kills his master) calls this darkly melodramatic, ultimately depressing but always gripping story “a right cameo of this nation”.