Faber £12.99 pp334
In 1920, ignoring her mother’s warnings, Isabel — 23, and feeling invincible — sets off for India with a husband she hardly knows. Immediately intrigued by Singh, an Indian doctor, she is warned against him; the fact that he is London born, and was educated at Eton and Oxford, makes colonial society particularly distrustful. The pair become friends, then lovers. Slaughter writes with insight about their difficult relationship — they inevitably become the target of scandalous gossip — and about the way Isabel slowly and painfully learns to understand her lover, and India. By the end of this richly detailed and moving book, Isabel is hardly recognis able as the naive young woman straight off the boat: she has found the courage to commit herself to Singh and to India, and is training as a doctor herself.
FIRST AID
by Janet Davey
Chatto £12.99 pp178
A woman, Jo, and her three squabbling children struggle on to a crowded train on a hot summer day; when the train stops in the middle of fields, her teenage daughter, Ella, opens the door, leaps out and runs away. Jo, inexplicably, does nothing. We gradually discover what lies behind Ella’s action. Since Jo’s husband deserted her, she has been working in a junk shop in a depressing seaside town, but her hopes for happiness with a new boyfriend, Felpo, vanished when, without warning or any apparent motive, he struck her across the face. Jo is fleeing to London and to the grandparents who raised her, where she will discover, slowly and painfully, the explanation for her lover’s behaviour. Jo’s story is in many ways bleak, but Davey’s coolly perceptive style makes it both touching and memorable.
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Chatto £12.99 pp224
Blackbird House — on the wild Massachusetts coast — is lovingly built in the late 18th century, a man’s gift to his wife, but, soon afterwards, he dies at sea. It is years before she accepts that he and her sons will never return. One of the drowned boys had taken a white blackbird to sea, and white birds still hover around the house. Hoffman, in a series of brief, moving stories, takes us through to the 1950s, conjuring up the lives of people who still, perhaps, haunt the house. A widow is rumoured to be a witch, while her lonely daughter dreams of escaping to California; a boy goes to fight in Europe, bringing home a German wife who nervously realises that his grandmother “loves you so much she would kill for you”.