Learn some hard truths about food and find out why a great YA author is just as well suited to adult fiction…
Fiction
1. Here Is The Beehive by Sarah Crossan is published by Bloomsbury Circus in hardback, priced £10.50 Amazon.
Until now, Sarah Crossan has used her sparse, electrifying free verse to galvanise, soothe and intrigue YA readers. Here Is The Beehive is her first foray into adult fiction, and while it’s as powerful as you’d expect from the Carnegie medal-winner, it’s also rather bleak. Three years into an affair with Connor, a client, lawyer Ana is hit by devastating, confounding news that sends her spinning, and sets her – their – secrets roiling. As she grasps for reason and comfort, she inserts herself into Connor’s wife’s life, dragging with her tendrils of obsession, and her own private agony. Crossan is typically incisive and direct, not shying from Ana’s (quite irritating) compulsions, or Connor’s casual cruelties, cataloguing the brief moments of joy, and the stark, repetitive mundanity of their affair. But amongst the sharpness of the detail, the wit of the dialogue and the grit of Ana’s turmoil, it leaves you a little cold and uneasy.
8/10
(Review by Ella Walker)
2. Strange Flowers by Donal Ryan is published by Doubleday in hardback, priced £12.99 (ebook £7.99) Amazon.
The peaceful lives of Paddy and Kit Gladney are shattered when their daughter Moll suddenly disappears. Her unexpected return five years later brings secrets and surprises that change her family and their Tipperary community for years to come. Donal Ryan’s multi-generational novel is a moving exploration of how people are bonded through love and loss. Beginning in 1970s rural Ireland, it plays out against a backdrop of old class distinctions, social pressures and religious traditions. Ryan’s lyrical, naturalistic writing has a timeless quality and is at its best when depicting the ancient Irish countryside. Characters’ inner complexities, as they struggle to balance desires, fears, regrets and grief, are at times beautifully portrayed. Themes of race, violence and sex lend moments of shock and drama, particularly at the book’s conclusion, but feel carefully handled. A lovingly crafted story that draws you in, gets under the skin and will resonate long after.
8/10
(Review by Tom Pilgrim)
3. Death In Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh is published by Jonathan Cape in paperback, priced £14.99 (£9.99) Amazon
This is the fifth volume of fiction from Moshfegh, a cult writer whose books are often about women living in disaffected self-isolation. True to the template, Death In Her Hands is written from the viewpoint of Vesta, an older woman who lives alone on a remote lakeside in the woods. One day she comes across a note in the woods talking about a dead body; no other evidence ever appears, but for the rest of the book Vesta will work in her deeply idiosyncratic way to uncover the meaning of these words. Vesta is no ordinary amateur sleuth. Based on some very limited internet and library research, she makes some highly dubious inferences, and her detailed conclusions about suspects, victim and crime (none of which may even exist) are more storytelling than deduction. As Vesta starts to construct a whole story around a few cryptic words, we start to wonder how much of her own reality has been constructed too. Vesta’s own place in the ‘mindspace’ – to use a favourite word of hers – increasingly starts to seem fragile and precarious. Is she ill? Was there ever a note? Who is writing who? It is the skill of this existential whodunnit that we are kept guessing and questioning to the end, and beyond.
7/10
(Review by Dan Brotzel)
Non-fiction
4. Spoon-Fed by Tim Spector is published by Jonathan Cape in paperback, priced £9.99 (ebook £9.99) Amazon.
The bestselling author of The Diet Myth, Tim Spector has built a reputation as a culinary demystifier. In his latest, Spoon-Fed, he tackles a number of myths surrounding food. It’s a somewhat worthy work, and he’s not going to win any prizes for flair: he likes his arguments systematic and his rebuttals evidence-based. But it’s undeniable he dishes up a harrowing tale of the food industry – poorly-regulated and rife with corruption, leaving a bad taste in the mouth. The book’s chief strength is in its reassuring message that if you have a balanced diet, most of the things you eat won’t actually kill you, despite all the scaremongering around. It’s a useful correction to the nonsense routinely peddled by self-appointed diet gurus, but beware: it’s something of an acquired taste.
6/10
(Review by Rachel Farrow)
Children’s book of the week
5. Never Show A T-Rex A Book by Rashmi Sirdeshpande, illustrated by Diane Ewen, is published by Puffin in paperback, priced £5.99 (ebook £3.99) Amazon
Dinosaurs can’t read – and as the little girl at the heart of this funny tale about the thrilling power of imagination discovers, that’s a good thing. If you showed a T-Rex a book, you would have to take them to school so they could learn how to read, and then they could be anything in the world – even the Prime Minister. Rashmi Sirdeshpande takes a simple idea for her fourth book and keeps raising the stakes in easy-to-follow sentences brimming with astonishment, while Diane Ewen’s energetic, engaging illustrations leap out of the page in a frenzy of vibrant colours as the story gets wilder and wilder. Never Show A T-Rex A Book is a clever love letter to libraries, so sadly missed due to the coronavirus lockdown. Whether a child is reading it themselves or listening to it being read aloud, it is bound to give them an enthusiasm for imagining stories of their own.
9/10
(Review by Natalie Bowen)
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