HERMAN
by Lars Saabye Christiensen, translated by Steven Michael Nordby
Arcardia Books £8.99
“Sometimes in the smallest of boys,” the cover-line says, “there beats the biggest of hearts.” Don’t be put off — this is a lot better than it sounds. Christiensen is Norway’s leading writer and his small hero has a wild, poetic intensity that makes him entertaining company. Herman is 11 and something strange has started to happen to him — he is going bald. Why? Parents and doctors are baffled. Herman has to work single-handedly towards an understanding of the adult world. Christiensen scrolls back to the era before puberty with sympathetic humour.
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SCHOOL’S OUT
by Christophe Dufosse translated by Shaun Whiteside
Heinemann £12.99
This extraordinary first novel from France has been compared to The Lord of the Flies and Donna Tartt’s A Secret History — so we are in the realm of serious freakery. A teacher commits suicide by hurling himself from a window, and his class is taken over by a colleague, Pierre Hoffman. The kids are quiet and well-behaved, but Hoffman senses something peculiar. “They were neither a class, nor a group,” he says, “but a gang.” Something odd is going on, and the story hurtles towards a creepy climax with jet-black humour and style.
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LOVE AND OTHER NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCES
by Mil Millington
Weidenfeld & Nicolson £10
If there is a male Bridget Jones, bringing intimate dispatches from the other side of the sex divide, it is Mil Millington. As he demonstrated in Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, he is horribly accurate and highly amusing about the nuts and bolts of modern relationships. Rob Garland is a local radio DJ. He is about to get married, has just had a narrow escape from death, and one mad night he burbles it all out to his unseen audience — why is he alive? Suddenly, he is a celebrity and a magnet for others who have miraculously evaded the Reaper. Hilarious.