The Golden Legend by Nadeem Aslam
Faber £16.99 pp384
“Pakistan produces people of extraordinary bravery. But no country should ever require its citizens to be this brave.” So says architect Nargis, shortly before her husband, Massud, is killed in a shootout. Her resilience is further tested when Pakistan’s intelligence services hound her to forgive the killer publicly, while her surrogate daughter Helen, a Christian, is pursued for blasphemy. With the help of Imran, an extremist-turned-good, they escape to an island where Nargis and Massud had planned to build a mosque, a Hindu temple and a church. Here, the cheesy symbolism worsens as Helen and Imran forget their religious differences to fall in love. Aslam’s pacy fifth novel fights to show how individuals can overcome collective brutality but it is beset by whopping improbabilities.
Wait for Me, Jack by Addison Jones
Sandstone £8.99 pp320
It is 1950 in San Francisco, and Jack, a copywriter on his first day in a job, decides he fancies Billie, the secretary with hair like Marilyn Monroe, and asks her out. They soon marry, strangers buoyed by misplaced optimism. Spanning 60 years, Jones’s deceptively casual, episodic novel is a warm-hearted dissection of a dysfunctional marriage: disappointing affairs, unfulfilled careers, chaotic children, incessant sniping and growing differences. Billie often imagines a Martian tapping her on the shoulder and asking: “So, is this it? This is your life? Really?” Yet the two stick it out, because they always find something — a joke, a song — that reminds them why they are together. Jones, who wrote four novels under the pseudonym Cynthia Rogerson, dedicates her book “to anyone who thinks they married the wrong person”. Uplifting and astute, this should save marriages.
You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman
Fourth Estate £12.99 pp288
Kleeman’s artful debut novel centres on a narrator known only as A, who has a creepy flatmate called B, a TV-guzzling boyfriend, C, and an empty life. Constantly hungry, A and B eat low-cal Popsicles and watch bonkers adverts for beauty products and chemical-only snacks. A also suspects B is encroaching on her identity: “If you reduced each of us to a list of adjectives, we’d come out nearly equivalent,” she laments, only to be encouraged by C to “think of yourself as a franchise”. Kleeman’s dystopic vision becomes even more unsettling when A joins a cult to try and turn herself into a ghost. Kleeman tackles these zeitgeist female themes of wellness, orthorexia and individualism with a sharp and original voice. Most potent is her uncanny fascination with the body, which leaves you feeling totally off-kilter with your own.