Girls on Fire by Robin Wasserman
Little, Brown £12.99 pp356
Ever since Gone Girl became a bestseller, “Girl” (and its variants) has become titular shorthand for “dark, female-driven psychological thriller, hoping to cash in on Gillian Flynn’s success” . Girls on Fire, American Robin Wasserman’s first novel for adults, is set in 1991 in the suffocatingly conservative Pennsylvanian town of Battle Creek and is a strong addition to this genre. Trouble begins when Lacey, a screw-up from an abusive home, befriends Hannah Dexter, the loneliest girl in her school year. As Lacey adopts the role of “sculptor”, with Hannah her “clay” , the first half of the novel becomes a feverish account of Hannah’s transformation from strait-laced bore into “Dex”, a teenager who will do anything Lacey commands: skip school, take magic mushrooms, even slaughter animals. Flicking between points of view, Wasserman is even in her storytelling, sustaining her narrative by slowly revealing the dangerous secrets Lacey is keeping. Wasserman writes with immense energy, but the devil worship, sexual assault and threesomes of the second half are overdone, and become almost farcical. As a portrait of a coming-of-age, obsessive female friendship, though, the novel is captivating.
Read the first chapter on the Sunday Times website
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Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain by Barney Norris
Doubleday £12.99 pp288
Twentysomething Barney Norris rose to fame with Visitors (2014), a play that charted an elderly couple’s descent into old age and dementia. His debut novel is a similarly tender meditation on love and loss. Norris structures his narrative around a car and moped collision, using the scene to map out the lives of five characters who witnessed or were involved in the crash. There’s Rita, a flower seller, drug dealer and alcoholic; Alison, a depressed army wife; Sam, a schoolboy falling in love for the first time whose father is dying of cancer; George, an elderly farmer who has just buried his wife; and Liam, a lonely young security guard. Told in the first person, their stories tangentially overlap but form discrete sections that cohere into a melancholic web of hopelessness and heartbreak. Norris writes beautifully, unearthing extraordinary depths in the everyday. The only weakness is Alison’s story: her voice is unconvincingly literary for its diary format. In the end, it’s Norris’s treatment of the elderly, and quietly profound reflections on lifelong love, that mark him out as a memorable writer, mature beyond his years.
Read the first chapter on the Sunday Times website
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