None of This Is Serious by Catherine Prasifka
Canongate £12.99 pp247
Reality seems to be coming adrift in this edgy story of dating — and existence — in the age of social media. Twentysomething Dubliner Sophie goes to parties and finds her friends’ Instagram photos more real than actually being there. Meanwhile, despite a veneer of wokeness, sexual relationships are as unreconstructed as ever (if anything, worse, with boys who think “choking” is a normal practice after seeing it online). And to crown everything, a mysterious crack has appeared in the sky.
This is much debated by climate change experts and conspiracy theorists, but no one knows what caused it, and before long it isn’t even trending on Twitter. Catherine Prasifka — a 25-year-old Dubliner herself — has a painfully raw and acute gift for catching the way things are, although her debut never quite completes the indictment of online life that seems to be coming: instead, the real evil seems to be men. Phil Baker
Metronome by Tom Watson
Bloomsbury £16.99 pp306
Partners in crime, middle-aged Aina and Whitney have been exiled for years on a remote island, separated from their little boy, Maxime, who would by now be a young man. Their obedience is guaranteed by life-saving pills, doled out at intervals by a clock machine, and they live out their strange existence (half Robinson Crusoe, half Big Brother) as they send radio reports to The Warden and wait for parole that may never come. And yet, if it is really an island, how has a stray sheep appeared? Can sheep swim? Aina begins to have doubts, and the story becomes a quest that takes on an increasingly desperate and even murderous turn. Set in a dystopian future with a country much like Denmark in the background, Tom Watson’s debut novel is imagined with an impressively detailed, three-dimensional solidity. PB
The Return of Faraz Ali by Aamina Ahmad
Sceptre £14.99 pp339
Aamina Ahmad has taken a gamble making the hero of her debut novel a routinely brutal police officer, in a story with few likeable characters. Opening in late-1960s Pakistan, The Return of Faraz Ali looks into the world of the kanjaris: hereditary sex workers in Shahi Mohalla, Lahore’s old “walled city” red-light district. A 12-year-old kanjari girl has been shot dead after partying with four or five men, one of whom is a local politician, and Inspector Faraz Ali is put on the case — not to solve it, but to hush it up. Instead, it sends him back to his roots, because his own mother was a kanjari, and the book fragments into a complicated back story. Ahmad was brought up in Britain, but has a convincing feel for Pakistan, which is depicted here as extraordinarily corrupt, and perfectly suited to crime fiction. PB
The Flames by Sophie Haydock
Doubleday £16.99 pp464
Sophie Haydock’s debut novel is inspired by the short, sometimes scandalous life of the Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele — and even more by the women he drew. Schiele died of Spanish flu, aged 28, in October 1918. His wife, Edith, 25, had died three days earlier, six months pregnant with their first child. They are buried side by side in Vienna. Intriguingly, 50 years after their death, Edith’s sister, Adele Harms, subject of Schiele’s best-known portrait Seated Woman with Bent Knee, was interred, at her request, in her brother-in-law’s plot.
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Haydock uses Adele’s imagined life as a framing device. In 1968 a young Viennese cyclist knocks over an elderly homeless-looking woman. The action spools back to the same neighbourhood in 1912 and the beautiful, restless Adele, who is scrutinising an attractive man moving into the apartment opposite. Schiele is being helped by his mistress, the working-class “Vally”.
Haydock builds her story through the interweaving lives of Schiele’s model muses: Adele; his younger sister, Gertrude; model Vally; his wife, Edith. She explores what agency these women had: although their limbs were often arranged in pornographic poses, the female gaze he captured can be brazenly defiant, hauntingly melancholy or needy. Were they objectified puppets or artistic collaborators?
This a confident debut, written in often urgent prose that holds the reader’s attention. Informative about Schiele, it serves an illuminating purpose: you will never again look at Schiele’s vivid portraits without wondering about his subjects’ lives beyond the frame. Patricia Nicol
The Colony by Audrey Magee
Faber £14.99 pp384
Audrey Magee’s tightly woven second novel is set in her native Ireland. We’re in the 1970s, but most of it feels a full century older than that. Two foreigners travel to a remote, Irish-speaking island for the summer: an English artist, there to paint the cliffs, and a French linguist, who has been chronicling the slow erosion of the Irish language on the island for five years running. Magee worries away at their desires and frustrations, and the shifting power dynamics between the men and the islanders, in a claustrophobic, even repetitive narrative. You could get lost amid the rabbit hunting, turf fires and endless cups of tea — but Magee shocks you awake with interspersed true accounts of people being murdered not far away in Northern Ireland, during the height of the Troubles. This is a quietly powerful book, almost old-fashioned, with Brian Friel and Eugene McCabe as clear influences. Don’t underestimate it — the ending is a punch to the gut. Laura Hackett
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
Picador £16.99 pp240
Julia Armfield’s debut short story collection, Salt Slow, was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer award, and was praised for its uncanny, gothic magic realism. This, her debut novel, retains that strangeness. Leah and Miri were happily married, until Leah’s submarine research expedition went wrong. When she finally returns, she is different, irrevocably changed by the ocean’s depths, dissolving before Miri’s eyes. Armfield jumps between Miri’s confusion at her wife’s strange symptoms, and Leah’s fragmented memories of the disaster. The result is frightening, otherworldly, but above all gripping. Armfield’s great triumph here is to transform a latent, abstract fear of the unknown into a pulsing, prickling tension — and to keep that tension taut for more than 200 pages. LH
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Careering by Daisy Buchanan
Little, Brown £14.99 pp384
Toxic relationships are having a bit of a literary moment. But Daisy Buchanan’s second novel features two narrators in toxic relationships with their careers. Imogen is trying to make it in the world of magazine journalism, and her boss, Harri, has been passed over for the top job after decades of sacrifice. Both women are forced to give every part of themselves to their jobs — not just all their free time, but their personal lives, their pasts: everything turns into content. Buchanan depicts an industry in which you can achieve success only by selling yourself.
And that’s what makes the “happy ending”, in which the two women set up their own publication, feel so hollow. Nothing important has actually changed. But never mind — Buchanan’s real talent is writing sex. As in her debut novel, Insatiable, there’s not a cringey metaphor in sight. The intimacy is so real that it feels a bit dirty to read it on the Tube — devour it at home instead. LH
