From Jonathan Lee's stylish The Great Mistake to AJ Pearce's latest, Foregone by Russell Banks and the new David Peace, this week's best new fiction
The Great Mistake
Jonathan Lee Granta £14.99
That New York City has the glories of Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Bronx Zoo is down largely to one person: Andrew Haswell Green, a lawyer and dreamer who was gunned down on Park Avenue in 1903, aged 83.
His gilded-age exploits and sudden death are novelised in this stylish, finely wrought mashup of mystery and history, which paints a dynamic portrait of both man and metropolis.
Hephzibah Anderson
Yours Cheerfully
AJ Pearce Picador £14.99
London 1941, and the Ministry of Information is desperate to recruit female workers for the war effort. Irrepressible Emmeline Lake, a journalist on the Women’s Friend, is determined to encourage their readers to sign up to the endeavour, but the complicated realities of women’s working lives threaten to scupper her plans.
Undaunted, Emmy fights for their rights, while also organising her own wedding, complete with parachute-silk dress. Buoyant and bubbly, a tonic in testing times.
Eithne Farry
Foregone
Russell Banks No Exit Press £12.99
It is April Fool’s Day 2018, and legendary Left-wing documentary film director Leonard Fife is being interviewed for a film about his life and work at home in Montreal.
Ever the iconoclast and now dying of cancer, Fife has his own agenda, and uses it as an opportunity for a deathbed confession to his watching wife. Imaginatively structured, this seamless meditation on ageing and mortality, memory and guilt is a late career high from an American master.
Simon Humphreys
Tokyo Redux
David Peace Faber £16.99
No one pushes the limits of the crime novel further than David Peace. Tokyo Redux completes his trilogy set in post-war Japan.
It’s an exploration of a historical crime – the murder of the boss of the Japanese railway system – and much more. Riveting and baffling.
John Williams
Comments 0
Share what you think
No comments have so far been submitted. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts, or debate this issue live on our message boards.
